Robin hears the bees
THE Governor and Deputy Governor are appointed for terms of five years, by the Queen, on the advice of the Prime Minis- ter. Governor Robin Leigh-Pemberton was chosen in the autumn of 1982, to take office in July 1983, and his term runs out at the end of June 1988. It is not yet apparent that he would accept a second term. He was reluctant enough to accept his first, giving up the chair of the National West- minster Bank. The Prime Minister was persistent and persuasive, and the result, unfair and unhelpful to the Governor, was that he found himself labelled a political choice. No one can now accuse him or his senior colleagues of being ministerial cro- nies. Mr Leigh-Pemberton has never seen any sense in having the Bank and the Treasury at war, and operational rela- tionships are good. Politically, though, the Bank has had a bruising time in the year of Johnson Matthey. The Governor is known to feel that, in averting a banking crisis and then in containing the damage, the Bank has not had the support to which it was entitled — and even that ministers have implied that he had not been frank with them. He is a man brought up to the idea of public duty, and he will never do less, but must he not begin to hear the call of the Kentish acres, and his bees, and his architecture, and his railway? After the first five years, another five? What points the question is that the Government's term of office runs out one month before the Governor's. The likeliest election date must still be the autumn of 1987, which is also, in the normal way, the time when a decision about the governorship will have to be made. Who will make it?
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