7 days ago
Letters: Don't blame Andrew Bailey
The Bank's breakdown
Sir: Your cover story with its attack on Andrew Bailey ('Broke Britain', 19 July) tells only half of the grisly story. All the major central banks had a sort of collective nervous breakdown during the Covid crisis, but none of the others lost its mind quite like the Bank of England.
The banks printed money by buying in their country's sovereign debt, at high prices. Most concentrated on short-dated stocks, where the potential capital loss from rising interest rates was smallest. The Bank bought in long-dated debt at prices which looked like madness to some of us at the time. These stocks are now being sold back into the market at a massive capital loss. One example: in May 2020 it bought gilts repayable in 2061 at a price of £101. It has recently been selling them back into the market at prices as low as £28.
Christopher Mahon of Columbia Threadneedle Investments has been shouting about this. By its own earlier calculations, the Bank estimated that total losses from this process would add up to a scarcely believable £115 billion. The sluggish fall in interest rates recently means that is almost certainly an underestimate. It amounts to incompetence and stupidity on a massive scale. No wonder the Bank is hoping nobody is listening.
Neil Collins
London SW10
Don't blame Bailey
Sir: Michael Simmons is wrong to criticise Sajid Javid's appointment of Andrew Bailey to the governorship of the Bank of England. After the tenure of the narcissistic and overtly political Mark Carney, a solid and boring functionary was what he thought the Bank needed in order for it to regain its place as an independent central bank. An event as huge and disruptive as Covid-19 – and the government's reaction of promising enormous unfunded subsidies to all and sundry – could not be foreseen.
Global indebtedness following Covid was not created by the Bank of England. Bailey was under the influence of domestic politics on one hand and peer pressure from abroad on the other. True, he might not have been the best of choices, but to place so much of the blame on him and on the Old Lady is disingenuous and unhelpful.
Anthony D.M. Peters
Great Rollright, Oxon
The rest is slander
Sir: No one loves reading an outrageous claim in the pages of The Spectator more than I do, and so I commend you for employing Dominic Sandbrook to peddle an entire host of them (Historian's notebook, 19 July). I don't know which was more entertaining: his insistence that Britain should have stabbed our gallant Gallic ally in the back in 1914, or the braggadocio with which he boasted of being able to hold his own in an Irish pub. One calumny, however, cannot be allowed to pass: his suggestion that my regrettable inability to join him on his Dublin pub crawl was due to any lack of stamina on my part. I will not go into details, it being poor form for those engaged in top-secret charitable work to boast of their good deeds; suffice to say that – had circumstances only been different – I would have relished the chance to join Paul Rouse in drinking Dominic under the table.
Tom Holland
London SW2
Pas un saucisson
Sir: Even if we white male novelists make it into print ('Who'll publish my toxic book?', 19 July), we struggle for space in the literary pages of national newspapers. My new novel NUNC! (a corker, by the way) was published by Little, Brown. The Tablet and Church Times raved about it. The Mail ran an enthusiastic paragraph. The Times seemed to like it. But from the rest: pas un saucisson. Literary editors are under pressure to commission clickbait arguments. That is easier with non-fiction. The country would be saner if it read more fiction, but madness is better for the bottom line.
Quentin Letts
How Caple, Herefordshire
Cobblers unite
Sir: Reading the Barometer piece about 'grandly named trade unions' (19 July) I was reminded that the first trade union I joined (in 1965, at the edge of 15, while working weekends at a slipper factory in Blackburn) was the 'Rossendale Union of Boot, Shoe and Slipper Operatives': RUBSSO. It only had about 3,000 members and later was merged into the even more grand National Union of Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trades (KFAT) – itself subsequently merged in the early 2000s into the boringly named 'Community Union'.
James Kay
Birkenhead, Merseyside
Rhodes rage
Sir: A.N. Wilson, in his overheated review of The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by W.K. Storey, makes at least one assertion that is factually wrong (Books, 19 July). Concentration camps were not, as Wilson states, 'that British invention'. The term was first used by the Spanish army in 1868 during the Ten Years War in Cuba. Even earlier examples can be traced to the USA for the internment of the Cherokee.
What Wilson also seems to ignore is that Rhodes was a man of his time, not some uniquely evil colonialist.
Dr Brian Austin
West Kirby, Wirral
Restoring Bishop Auckland
Sir: Charles Moore describes the wonderful rejuvenation of the Bishop's Palace and Castle at Bishop Auckland by Jonathan Ruffer (Notes, 19 July). During the visit of the Rectory Society last week, I too was able to see the buildings, the Zurbarans, the huge walled garden planted with vegetables and flowers. It is an amazing achievement by Ruffer and his wife Jane. Now he has an even bigger project, which is to rejuvenate the town centre, with its fine Market Square and many empty shops and cafés. I wish him every success.
Cessa Moore
Hereford
