CITY AND SUBURBAN
No more political ravishment when the Old Lady wears the trousers
CHRISTOPHER F1LDES
I have won the Bank of England's first prize. What glory! The Old Lady, the Bank's journal, offered prizes for a new caption for 'Political Ravishment', the original Gillray cartoon of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. She is shown trying to fend off the advances of a lean and urgent figure, hitherto identified as Wil- liam Pitt the Younger. My caption was, naturally, 'You've lost weight, Nigel.' Cer- tainly Mr Lawson, in his relations with his Old Lady, left us in no doubt as to who, if anyone, was wearing the trousers. 'When I say they go up, they go up, and when I say they go down, they go down', he ex- plained, speaking of interest rates. How startling, then, to find him, in his resigna- tion speech to the House of Commons, converted to Old Lady's Lib: 'A year ago I proposed to the Prime Minister a fully worked out scheme for the independence of the Bank of England.' The Prime Minister's response to his proposition was cool, and the plan is now thought to be locked in a Treasury filing cabinet. The idea, though, is not so easily shut up. The Governor, Robin Leigh Pemberton, argues for giving the Bank an overriding responsibility for stable prices — `to se- cure, as it were, the soundness of the currency'. In New Zealand they have taken that so far as to pay their central bank governor by results, on an upside-down index-linked contract — the more he makes the money worth, the more of it he can keep.
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