For several months while Eddie George was studying economics at Cambridge, inflation was negative. Within days of his death last weekend at the age of 70 after a long battle with cancer, inflation went negative. In between it went up to almost 27%.

His career at the Bank of England, which started in 1962 until his retirement as Governor in 2003, spanned a couple of posh Tory prime ministers, a modernist Labour PM, then a hopelessly disastrous Tory administration, followed by an almost equally appalling Labour government - albeit one that, with Denis Healey as Chancellor, started to embrace monetarism - then a reformist Tory government, followed by a useless Tory government, then a reformist Labour government, then...

George, who was given a life peerage in 2004, became Governor shortly after the debacle of Black Wednesday (or White Wednesday, if you prefer), when Britain suffered the humiliation of being ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) club that it should never have joined in the first place.

Four years later, he was able to preside over an independent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee that had been handed responsibility for determining interest rates according to what was best for the economy, not the politicians. Unfortunately, at the same time, then-Chancellor Gordon Brown took away the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street's responsibilities for supervising the banks, handing most of that role, instead, to a newly-created super-regulator, the Financial Services Authority.

Wouldn't his memoirs have been fascinating! As far as I'm aware, he never wrote them. What a shame. It's our loss.