Sir Mervyn King

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King.

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He's been in charge during a period of unprecedented global financial turmoil, yet under his leadership it's emerged as one of the world's most powerful central banks.

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He may have grown used to the pink tail coats and top hats of his attendants in Threadneedle Street, but his background was far from privileged. His father worked on the railways and then became a teacher. His mum was a housewife and sang in the church choir. Their son, an academic whiz, studied hard, and gained a top first at Cambridge, going on to teach at MIT and the London School of Economics.

Presenter1:14

Throughout his demanding public life he's been sustained by his twin passions for cricket and Aston Villa.

Presenter1:21

His other great love appears to have been an intriguingly slow burn. He first met Barbara, the woman who would become his wife, in nineteen seventy.

Presenter1:31

They married in two thousand and seven.

Presenter1:34

He says Being the Governor of the Bank of England is actually the easiest job I've ever done. You're in charge, and you've got tremendous support. Well, um, Sir Mervyn, you've only got a few weeks to go at the Bank, where you've worked for twenty two years. I'm wondering if you're planning a proper knees up to say goodbye.

Sir Mervyn King1:52

I'm planning a gap year or a gap six months or so as a break, so it'll be a holiday.

Presenter1:58

And the key phrase, I wonder, uh if it might be in the introduction, was you're in charge. You have this backroom reputation for being

Presenter2:06

Very hard-working, single-minded, and quite often the governor with the iron fist. Do you think that's fair?

Sir Mervyn King2:13

I don't think the Iron Fist is. I demand a lot of others, but no more than I would demand of myself.

Presenter2:19

What do you demand of yourself, then? I mean hard working.

Sir Mervyn King2:20

Yeah, I think total commitment, hard work and

Sir Mervyn King2:24

A real dedication to understanding.

Sir Mervyn King2:28

why the economy is behaving in the way it is and what we can do about it.

Presenter2:31

As your time comes to an end, then, at the bank, what have been your personal highlights?

Sir Mervyn King2:35

Well, there are many, from hours spent in windowless rooms in previous international meetings to the amazing day when Eddie George and I sat alone in the bank on a bank holiday Monday celebrating independence of the Bank of England and discussing how we were going to make success of independence to the day every year we have a family sports day at the bank which is called Governor's Day and I changed the nature of it and everyone in the bank and their families are invited down to our sports ground and we

Presenter3:02

And when you say you changed the nature of it, there used to be a VIP area where only those and such as those were allied.

Sir Mervyn King3:05

There used to be a VIP sit-down lunch and no one else got any food at all. So we changed that and there is now barbecue food for everyone. And the centrepiece, as ever, is the cricket match, where my 11, and this year will include Andrew Strauss, the former England captain, play the Bank of England 11. And it's a way of saying thank you to all the staff and their families.

Presenter3:29

They don't let you win the cricket, do they?

Sir Mervyn King3:30

I choose my team very carefully. The secret to winning a cricket match is to choose the right players on your side.

Presenter3:36

In your most recent pronouncements you said growth is a little stronger and inflation a little weaker. Um the economy, then, is still struggling, as we all know, to get out of intensive care. You you still seem rather unsure of the physical state that the economy is in.

Sir Mervyn King3:52

Well, I do think you can see signs now of a recovery. The economy is growing not as fast as we would like it to grow. But no one can foretell the future, and all sorts of unexpected events will come along. After all, no one really foresaw the precise nature of events that took place in two thousand seven and two thousand eight, which add up, in my view, probably to the biggest financial crisis the world has ever seen.

Presenter4:14

Yes, I think we may take time to concentrate on that a little later on. Time for the music. Tell me about your first piece this morning, then, Sir Mervyn King. What are you going to hear?

Sir Mervyn King4:20

Well, the first piece reflects my passion for cricket. And the fact that cricket has largely disappeared from state schools was something I worried about. And together with Mark Nicholas, we began Chance to Shine, the charity to regenerate cricket in state schools. And it began in 2005, England against Australia, perhaps the most exciting Ashes series ever played. And it coincided with Channel 4 showing cricket on television. And the theme music was Lou Bega Mambo No. 5.

Speaker 14:51

One, two, three, four, five. Everybody in the car, soak them on last ride to the liquor store around the corner. The boys say they want some gin and juice, but I really don't wanna be a bus like I had last week. I must stay keepers, talk is cheap. I like Angela, Pamela, Sandra, and Rita. And as I continue, you know they're getting sweeter. So what can I do? I really value, my lord. To me, spurting is just like a sport. Anything five is all good

Presenter5:21

That was Lou Bega and Mambo number five. So, Sir Mervyn King, let's take a look for a moment at the Bank of England as an institution. First of all, I mentioned in the introduction these sort of pink coats and the silver buttons and the top hats. Why does that still happen? Quite alienating, I think, for a lot of people, this idea that it might be an institution that's sort of rather stuck in the past.

Sir Mervyn King5:42

Well, it isn't stuck in the past and I don't think it's sensible to confuse the symbols of the clothing or the architecture from the way people behave and what actually goes on there. And the single most important asset which the Bank of England has is the pride that people take in working for the bank. And the traditions and institutions of the bank are not something which belong to me to play around with, to make political gestures with. They are part of the tradition of the bank that's been there since 1694 and our responsibility is to maintain some of those traditions. They are symbols of what the bank stands for, trust, continuity, honesty, integrity.

Presenter6:19

Um

Presenter6:20

This financial crisis, then, that started of course in 2007, then and over the intervening years, what have been the moments that have really

Presenter6:28

Kept you awake at night.

Sir Mervyn King6:30

I don't think anything has kept me awake at night because my training, my reading of financial history meant that I knew exactly what we had to do. So for example when RBS got into serious problems and couldn't get to the end of the day and we knew that the banks wouldn't be able to survive the next day unless we did something, it was obvious what we had to do. We would have to lend money to that bank to an unlimited extent for a few weeks until the problems could be sorted out. So in that sense it was quite easy to know what to do.

Presenter6:58

You mentioned RBS being rescued by the taxpayer. As we all know, they're currently recording losses of five point two billion. We've got the LIBOR fixing scandal, a continued failure of managing to get actual money from the banks to people who run small businesses and medium sized businesses. Is it any wonder that the public have lost faith in the world of finance and banking?

Sir Mervyn King7:21

No, it's no wonder at all, in many ways, when the crisis hit in two thousand seven eight, I was surprised that people weren't angry sooner.

Sir Mervyn King7:30

And I think you can see it coming through now as the impact on standards of living becomes more obvious, and they have every right to be angry. But it is the case that banks are safer now, they've got more capital, they can absorb losses more easily than they could back in 2008 when they were extraordinarily fragile institutions. There's still some way to go. But this crisis wasn't caused by a few individuals. It was a crisis of the system of banking that we'd allowed to grow up. And it's very important that we don't demonize the individuals, but we do keep cracking on with changing the system. And we are now approaching the point when we will have put in place all the reforms that are needed to give us a much safer banking system that I believe will then behave in the right way. And I go to schools and speak to six formers and others, and I found before the crisis that a disturbingly high proportion of them

Sir Mervyn King8:25

instead of wanting to become engineers or scientists or musicians, wanted to go and work in the city. Why? Because they wanted to make a lot of money. Now I think they don't really want to go and earn money if it's being earned in a way that creates enormous damage to the rest of society. And I think that's a very healthy thing.

Presenter8:42

Let's have some music then. We're on your second disc. What are we going to hear?

Sir Mervyn King8:45

The second disc takes me back to 1992, just before Black Wednesday. Alan Budd, who was at the Treasury, and myself were sent to Frankfurt on what became known as the world's least successful diplomatic mission, to persuade the Bundesbank that Britain could stay in the exchange rate mechanism. And of course we had no chance because the economics didn't add up. But what that meeting did lead to was a close friendship between Otmar Issing, the chief economist of the Bundesbank then, and we become good friends. And I visit him in Würzburg and he takes me to the Mozart Festival. And one of the first pieces I heard was Mozart's Symphony No. 40.

Presenter10:22

Part of Mozart's Symphony No. forty, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karian. So, Sir Mervyn King, you were born in nineteen forty eight in Buckinghamshire. Your father

Presenter10:33

was a teacher. He had been he had been a railwayman early on in his life. And interestingly, your your dad was denied a university education, not because he wasn't smart enough, but because there wasn't enough money around in the family.

Sir Mervyn King10:45

Yes, he they didn't have enough money to send him to university. Then the war broke out and he joined the army and the engineers helped to to plan the invasion and that's where he met my mother and they were married during the war.

Sir Mervyn King10:58

And at the end of the war there was a programme to train demobbed servicemen to be teachers, and he joined that programme, became a teacher. But he was very determined that my brother and I have had opportunities to go to the best local state schools and have a chance to go to university.

Presenter11:15

And tell me about your mother.

Sir Mervyn King11:16

My mother uh looked after us at home, and she was uh the mainstay of the the local Methodist church. Uh the church was the centre of everything that happened on Sunday. Went to church three times a day, and my mother sang in the choir.

Presenter11:28

Your father was a lay Methodist preacher then. And I know your father is dead now, but in recent years, during the financial crisis, as he watched the savagery that was being meted out on the poor individuals at the end of the line, did he ever talk to you about that?

Sir Mervyn King11:42

Yes, a little. I think he found it very hard to understand the connection between what was going on.

Sir Mervyn King11:48

and the business economics and geography that he had read and taught when he was a teacher many years earlier. And I understand why. I still have letters which were sent to me by bank managers who had retired before the crisis saying that they felt that an awful lot was lost when the tradition of a local banking system was abandoned in order to save costs.

Presenter12:11

Yeah. Definitely.

Sir Mervyn King12:12

Music.

Presenter12:12

Third of the morning, Sir Mervyn King, tell me about this why have ye chosen it?

Sir Mervyn King12:16

On my very first day at grammar school, it was a boys' grammar school in Wolverhampton, every new boy had to sing up and down the scale solo in front of the music master. And you were divided into two groups, the sheep and the goats. The sheep were in the school choir and had lunch on the first sitting for the rest of their school career. I was in the goats, I was told I wasn't musical, and I had lunch on the second sitting every day for the rest of my school career. Twenty years later, in a conversation, I realised that being tone deaf wasn't as black and white as I had been led to believe. And this is one of the pieces that really got me excited about classical music. It's Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, described by Wagner as the apotheosis of the dance. And for me, it is dance music. I do not know how people can sit still in a concert hall and listen to this without moving up and down.

Speaker 112:42

Wasn't it?

Presenter14:05

The Vienna Philharmonic was part of the opening from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in A major Carlos Kleiber conducting. And you just, Sir Mervyn King, managed to stay in your seat throughout that, yes. Just. Do you like dancing?

Sir Mervyn King14:14

Just

Sir Mervyn King14:17

Yes, though I'm not very good at it. Now I have promised my wife that when I leave the bank I shall take dancing lessons.

Presenter14:17

Beautiful.

Presenter14:22

This will be in your gap year, is your gaping in here. You did have a gap year before. That was in, I think it was 1966.

Sir Mervyn King14:24

In my gap.

Presenter14:29

It was nine months long, and it wasn't in Kosamui as they tend to be these days for students. It was in Wolverhampton.

Presenter14:36

Tell me about that.

Sir Mervyn King14:38

Yeah.

Presenter14:38

Yeah.

Sir Mervyn King14:38

It was supply teaching, and it's the most exhausting job I have ever done in my life. I would come back.

Sir Mervyn King14:44

You know, at five o'clock in the afternoon, and I'd have to lie down, even at the age of eighteen, and sleep for an hour to recover from the exertions of teaching.

Presenter14:51

Tell me more about it. What was so exhausting?

Sir Mervyn King14:53

Well, because the children were so lively and enthusiastic, I started a cricket team there. But the the sheer energy that you had to put in managing the classroom, helping the children in the playground or at lunch time, it was emotionally and physically draining.

Presenter15:09

You not only got a first class degree, you got the top first class degree in your year. After that you you went to Harvard as a Kennedy scholar. You'd never been to America before. It must have hit your

Sir Mervyn King15:19

Right between the eyes. Well, it certainly did. And all of us who were Kennedy scholars that year, we went out in September 1971. None of us had been to America before. That evening, with my new American roommates, I ate my first ever pizza. I heard.

Presenter15:35

Did you eat it with your hands, or did you use a knife and fork?

Sir Mervyn King15:37

I think I tried to use a knife and fork. And uh and like the cicadas and the noise of the fire engines, it was very hard to sleep. So it was an extraordinary experience.

Presenter15:38

And

Presenter15:46

So you came back from America then and you were a professor of investment at Birmingham University. You were offered the job when you were just twenty eight. And and by repute I I've read former pupils saying that you were very en engaged in the process of teaching. You found it quite a nourishing thing yourself, did you?

Sir Mervyn King16:02

Yes, I really enjoyed teaching. I I think that uh the process of preparation, of thinking, talking about something, explaining it, actually makes you understand it in a deeper way. And that is what I really enjoy doing.

Presenter16:17

Do you carve out an area of your day that is your thinking time, that people know not to bother you, because Mervyn's thinking?

Sir Mervyn King16:23

I try very hard, and my office tries very hard, to protect me as much as possible each morning to have as much of the morning free as I can to sit and read and think and reflect. And I think that's absolutely crucial. I think people who are so busy that they're rushing from one meeting to another and never get time to sit and think will fail in their objectives because they won't be able to sort out in their own mind what it is they're really trying to achieve.

Presenter16:50

It's time for your fourth piece of music, then, Sir Mervyn King. Tell me what we're going to hear now.

Sir Mervyn King16:54

We're going to hear Bob Dylan. The reason is that my best friend at school, Michael Fosbrook,

Sir Mervyn King17:00

was the person I did almost everything with. We played cricket together, we created a debating society together, we played chess, and in the sixth form we deconstructed the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Sadly, he died far too early of cancer. And this is in Mike's memory. It's Bob Dylan, Highway Sixty One.

Speaker 217:18

Well, Mac the Finger said to Louis the King, I got 40 red, white, blue, shoestrings And a thousand telephones that don't ring Do you know where I can get rid of these things? And Louis the King said, let me think for a minute, son.

Speaker 217:41

Then he said yes, I think it can be easily done. Just take everything down to highway 61.

Presenter17:49

That was Bob Dylan and Highway Sixty One. So, Sir Mervyn King, it was nineteen ninety one then when you took the job of Chief Economist at the Bank of England. That was sort of, I suppose, the start of your second career. Um somebody said he got people out of their tank tops and sandals. What does that mean, I wonder?

Sir Mervyn King18:06

I have no idea. I have never heard that before. Right. What was certainly true was that the economists in the bank had been put into a special almost compound where they did their work as economists, and the people who were doing policy

Presenter18:08

Right.

Speaker 218:14

Yeah.

Sir Mervyn King18:19

were in other parts of the bank. So the idea was to bring economics absolutely to the heart of the bank, and I think that's what's been achieved.

Presenter18:28

Let's look then at the period around august two thousand seven, the start of August indeed, it's the eighth of August, and the financial crisis is starting to rumble.

Presenter18:37

In a speech that day you described our banking system, as I'm quoting directly, much more resilient than in the past. How do you look back on that analysis now?

Sir Mervyn King18:46

Well, it clearly wasn't as resilient as it as it was in the past. And I think we had that we had believed that the financial system as a whole was more resilient.

Sir Mervyn King18:56

Because the risk was spread away from the banks towards hedge funds and other investors who had bought all the derivative instruments, and therefore we thought the risk was in the hands of people who knew how to manage it. And I think we learnt that that was not true and that the banks themselves, while apparently having sold these instruments to other financial firms, in fact were still holding the liabilities for them, and they themselves had borrowed so much from the rest of the financial system.

Sir Mervyn King19:27

that the banks were very fragile and once people lost confidence in the banks,

Sir Mervyn King19:31

Then they couldn't obtain funding and they couldn't lend to anyone else.

Presenter19:34

But surely I mean part of the Bank of England's role was to scan, as I understand it, scan the wider economy and warn as to whether the risks were building in the financial system.

Presenter19:46

And it didn't do that. Do do you think that you were guilty of taking too academic an approach to what was happening in the economy?

Sir Mervyn King19:52

No, and it's not true to say we didn't warn. If you look at our reports that we published

Sir Mervyn King19:58

In the several years before the crisis, they were full of warnings about what was happening to risk, about the danger of new types of financial instruments. But of course the climate of the time, not just amongst regulators and politicians, but amongst the press and informed opinion generally, was that we had a wonderfully successful banking system. No one really imagined that things could go so badly wrong so quickly.

Presenter20:23

Like anybody at the top, of course, you you've had your critics. David Blanche Flower, member of the Monetary Policy Committee for three years, was one of them. He has said that hindsight isn't good enough. We pay the Governor a large salary to have some foresight.

Presenter20:38

What do you make of that?

Sir Mervyn King20:39

Well, right through my career at the bank, people have said, oh, we pay the Bank of England to anticipate the future. That's complete nonsense, because many things happen in the future that no one can foresee. Let me give an example now. None of us know what is going to happen to the Euro area. And anyone who says today that they know exactly what will happen to the Euro area is a charlatan. Of course, after the event, the airways will be full of people who say, I knew, and many of them will have said it, but they didn't know at the time. What you pay the Bank of England for is to understand the nature of the system and to respond in the right way. And we did.

Presenter21:15

Let's have some music then. We're on your. Yes, well, here we are. We're on your fifth. Tell me about this.

Sir Mervyn King21:21

This has never been played on radio before. There may be a reason for that. Or indeed perhaps anywhere else. It's about 1982. I will say no more about it. Let's let the listeners hear the words and I think they will immediately understand what it's about.

Presenter21:25

There may be a reason for that.

Speaker 121:37

Uh

Speaker 121:38

We're all going to Rotterdam Each and every Villa Fanshau Colour.

Speaker 121:46

I serve the law.

Speaker 121:49

Cause we're the greatest football team And we're the best you've ever seen

Speaker 121:58

I still belong Yeah.

Speaker 122:01

Yeah, I still are the greatest football team.

Presenter22:06

Well, that was Doug O'Brien singing Rotterdam eighty two. You you really enjoyed that, Sir Mervyn King.

Sir Mervyn King22:12

That was the triumphant winning of the European Cup in Rotterdam in May 1982.

Presenter22:18

Right, do you play that for pleasure at home?

Sir Mervyn King22:20

I do, absolutely. And everyone I play it to, they say it's the catchiest tune there'll be on the programme ever.

Presenter22:25

Well, you certainly can't get it out of your head, that's for sure.

Sir Mervyn King22:27

That's for sure.

Presenter22:27

I want to go back to nineteen seventy, Sir Mervyn. You met Barbara Mellander while you were at Cambridge. Did she make quite an impression on you?

Sir Mervyn King22:37

She did. A very big impression on me, yes.

Presenter22:40

Tell me more.

Sir Mervyn King22:42

Well, I suppose, to be blunt, I fell in love and um

Sir Mervyn King22:45

She we were both students in Cambridge at the time, and she went back to Finland, and in those days students didn't have telephones or anything of that kind, and indeed even if you'd had one it wouldn't have helped much, because you had to book a telephone call to Finland forty eight hours in advance. People can't really imagine.

Sir Mervyn King23:01

what deregulation has done to the telephone system. So we we drifted apart and you know I had relationships but never got married and about you know almost thirty years later the telephone rang and

Sir Mervyn King23:12

A voice says it's Barbara.

Presenter23:14

It just rang out of the blue.

Sir Mervyn King23:16

Completely out of the blue. I mean, the moral of this story is never change your telephone number. But um so we met at Frankfurt Airport and I felt exactly the same as I had in nineteen seventy. And then we she moved to England and we got married in two thousand and seven.

Presenter23:30

And and Barbara had been married and had children and then was divorced. She must always then have held a flame for you if she bothered to phone you after thirty years.

Sir Mervyn King23:32

Two children.

Sir Mervyn King23:38

Well it may have been she didn't have enough entries in her phone book and I don't know how many she went down before.

Presenter23:42

Oh, you must have asked her.

Sir Mervyn King23:45

No. No, I think there was clearly something there. And of course now uh she has two lovely daughters. I have two two marvellous stepdaughters and four

Sir Mervyn King23:56

absolutely wonderful step-grandchildren and they are the now the center of our life.

Presenter24:01

I know this I mean, I hope that I know this is quite a personal question, but it does genuinely interest me why in that thirty years there there had not been

Presenter24:10

Marriage and children and all of that.

Sir Mervyn King24:12

I think because I I had totally dedicated myself to my career and that meant travelling around the world. And I would go every summer to the United States to join a research workshop or I'd take a term off and go and teach. So I was always moving to and fro and never really had a sort of settled domestic base and the career always came first. That was probably a mistake.

Presenter24:35

That's quite a sacrifice, isn't it?

Sir Mervyn King24:37

Yes, it is a sacrifice. But when Barbara and I got married she gave a speech, and I've learnt never ever to speak after her. And she finished her speech by turning to me and saying We all know that Mervyn loves desserts. There is a saying in Finnish Grandchildren are the dessert of life.

Speaker 224:56

Uh

Presenter24:56

Ugh.

Sir Mervyn King24:57

And so she brought me the most perfect dessert in fact four of them.

Presenter25:01

How wonderful. Let's have some music then. Tell me about this. What what are we going to hear now?

Sir Mervyn King25:06

We're going to hear now what I think is one of the most beautiful romantic songs. It's uh it's a Russian song.

Sir Mervyn King25:12

It's by Glinker, but after a poem by Pushkin, I Remember the Wonderful Moment, and it's a a song about discovery, about love, loss, and then rediscovery.

Speaker 225:25

Uh

Presenter25:25

Go the pari mitz ni.

Presenter25:29

Recier aux brig l'emistré.

Speaker 225:37

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 225:40

Taba yes.

Speaker 225:46

Tabai Nyebias Niya Charoti.

Presenter26:05

Bias barch with the Canadian, Biistilos Biazhri, Bias.

Speaker 226:06

Yeah, that's too much.

Speaker 126:06

Christ the Warburg is of the Canadian

Presenter26:16

Yes, it lost a desert race and it's a rule between me.

Presenter26:24

The Apomnyo Chudnaya Mignovienya I remember the wonderful moment sung there by Borisimeria and composed by Mikhail Glinka.

Presenter26:33

So, Sir Mervyn King Reading what Alastair Darling of course he was Chancellor at the time of the crisis ha has written about what he thinks of what you did and other people did, I d I get the impression you're probably not going for a drink with him any time soon. Would I be right?

Sir Mervyn King26:46

No, I don't think that is true. I mean, my wife and I invited him and his wife round to our home for dinner.

Presenter26:46

No, I

Sir Mervyn King26:52

When he left office to thank him for all the work, I enjoyed working with Alastair because I thought he had two qualities that were very important in the crisis. One was that he kept very calm, and the other was he has a sense of humour, and these are absolutely vital. So I remember one meeting we were discussing the fate of various banks, and they all had code names, I mean crazy code names, and Alastair and I got very confused by this, and he and I both thought we were discussing Jaguar, the car firm. It turned out Jaguar was the code name for a completely different bank. And it must have been about 10 minutes before we realised we weren't discussing the car firm.

Presenter27:26

Uh what about George Osborne? Has he got uh a suitable sense of humour for the job?

Sir Mervyn King27:31

And I think that actually most of the politicians that I've had the good fortune to work with are far more impressive people than the press would lead you to believe. They don't get to where they are without being extraordinarily determined, very articulate and very intelligent people. Perhaps we would all do better to give politicians space, to let them go away in private, to think something through in depth and then come back and talk about it at length, rather than expect our politicians to have an immediate solution to every problem every twenty minutes when a microphone is put in front of them.

Speaker 127:45

Yeah.

Sir Mervyn King28:06

Yeah.

Presenter28:06

Let's have s

Sir Mervyn King28:07

Yeah.

Presenter28:07

Uh

Sir Mervyn King28:07

Yeah.

Presenter28:07

Music then?

Sir Mervyn King28:08

What are we going to hear? This is your seventh. So the next choice again is something that's never been played on radio.

Presenter28:14

Indeed, we should let people know that they're going to hear this is unreleased material, it's not commercially available, this is a little window on a private moment here.

Sir Mervyn King28:21

It is. This is a recording from a rehearsal of a work that some friends and I commissioned from the London Symphony Orchestra. And this is by one of our brightest young composers, Hugh Watkins. And it's a concerto for the orchestra and three solo instruments: the harp, violin, and the bassoon. And this is an extract from the London concerto by Hugh Watkins with Rachel Gough playing the bassoon in an extraordinarily expressive way.

Presenter29:44

Uh

Speaker 129:45

Uh

Presenter29:51

Recorded in rehearsal there. That was the London Concerto composed by Hugh Watkins, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Xi'an Jiang, with Carmeni Lowry on violin, Rachel Gough on bassoon, and Bryn Lewis on harp. So I wonder, Sir Mervyn King, what about your legacy then? Because we see inflation hovering at around 2.8, 2.9 percent, and you you have said in the past that if I can look back and say that you know inflation came in line and was round about was at two percent, I'd be very happy. You're not going to be able to say that, of course.

Presenter30:25

It's as a result of much bigger problems that the world has been dealing with. But is that a cause of significant regret to you?

Sir Mervyn King30:32

Well obviously the events that have happened in the last five years are ones that no one would have wanted to see happen. But inflation over the last twenty years since I've been at the bank has been exactly 2% a year on average, which is way below the 13% a year that it was right through the 1970s or the peak of 27%.

Sir Mervyn King30:53

And it's, you know, two point four percent in the latest number. And I think that if we can gradually get back to a satisfactory recovery, inflation will come down and we'd be back again to good economic conditions.

Presenter31:04

I should mention I haven't mentioned it yet your book The British Tax System. Do you have a plan to write any more books?

Sir Mervyn King31:10

Well the British tax system was co-authored with John Kay. I don't want to join the chorus of people who write books with the subtitle Why I Was Right and Everyone Else Was Wrong. I think the historians will make their judgment in twenty years' time and I think the only judgments that people can rely on are the judgments of historians who dispassionately look back and say what they think happened.

Presenter31:33

Uh the Canadian Mark Carney, of course, is going to be your successor. If you could give him one piece of advice to take with him as he embarks on this huge challenge, what would it be?

Sir Mervyn King31:41

It it would be to be himself.

Sir Mervyn King31:43

He's an outstanding person, but the important thing is that he does it in his own way.

Presenter31:47

Let's have your final piece of music, then. What are we going to hear?

Sir Mervyn King31:50

The final piece of music is My Ship, a song from the musical Lady in the Dark. I just love it. It's a beautiful song, it was sung at my wedding.

Sir Mervyn King31:59

By the very talented Finnish soprano Hedvig Paulig, of whom I hope we shall hear a lot more in years to come, but on this record it's Anne-Sophie Fonotta.

Presenter32:08

My ships are glow with a million birds, And rude is fain each wind The sun sits high on a surface sky Where my ship comes in

Speaker 132:33

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 132:35

I can wait there.

Presenter32:38

MY SHIP FROM LADY IN THE DARK MUSIC by Kurt Weil and lyrics by Aragershanwitz performed there by Anne Sophy von Otter. So I'm going to give you the Bible now and the complete works of Shakespeare, Sir Mervyn. You can take another book along. What would you like to take?

Sir Mervyn King32:51

I spent four very happy years as a trustee of the National Gallery, and in retirement I'm going to spend a lot of time looking at paintings. Indeed, I want to learn to look with time. Of course, on the island, I can't do that, so I want to take the complete illustrated catalogue of the National Gallery in London, so I can look at the paintings every day.

Presenter33:12

It's yours, and a luxury too.

Sir Mervyn King33:14

Well, ideally I'd like to take my entire library. If I can't do that, then I'll take a good telescope so I can exploit the absence of urban light pollution to explore the universe and outer space.

Presenter33:25

Yes, I think because we've already given you some books, we're going to have to force you to leave the library at home and so you may have the telescope. And if you had to save just one track from the waves, which one would it be?

Sir Mervyn King33:31

And if you

Sir Mervyn King33:35

It would be the last one, my ship, because I think every morning I would wake up and I'd look out to sea and I would know either that the ship was coming to take me away, or that it was bringing my true love to me.

Presenter33:48

It's yours. Sir Mervyn King, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir Mervyn King33:53

Thank you for giving me respite for a few minutes on your lovely desert island.

Presenter34:22

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash radio four.