Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is said to have fallen out with Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England.

The irony is that Mr Brown was the Chancellor of the Exchequer – finance minister – who granted “independence” to Britain’s central bank.

Indeed, it is widely regarded as his greatest achievement. Certainly he has enjoyed great credit for it over the subsequent decade.

Yet, even at the time, there were a few older heads who muttered that there was a reason that independence had not been granted before: although the Chancellor of the Exchequer had given away a key power over the economy, he remained politically and constitutionally responsible for it.

In practical terms, that mattered little so long as the Bank’s stable money policy underpinned the boom that Mr Brown, and the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had inherited from the previous Conservative administration.

However, a conflict of interest was bound to develop when tougher times returned – as they always do, much as politicians would like to pretend otherwise. Faced with recession, politicians tend to pump money into the economy, especially when an election looms, as it does for Mr Brown.

However, Mr King, like all good central bankers, is an inflation “hawk”.

It does not help that Messers Brown and King are both literal-minded, academic types, stubborn about what they see as points of principle – whereas their respective predecessors, Mr Blair and Sir Edward “Eddie” George, were famously smooth social operators who were able to paper over any cracks.

It seems that central bank independence really makes the economy – and the lives of every entrepreneur in Britain – dependent on the social skills, or social ineptitude, of a politician and an unelected official.