Profile Mervyn King Bank of England Governor

Profile Mervyn King Bank of England Governor : Mervyn King has been Governor of the Bank of England since 2003. Here is a profile of the guardian of Britain's monetary policy:

The son of a railway clerk from Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, the Bank of England’s Governor was marked out as exceptionally bright from an early age. When he left Cambridge in 1969 he was one of just 12 out of 200 economics students to be awarded a First. Every one of his four papers was marked "Alpha", marking him out as one of the best economists of his generation.

Mr King's next 20 years were spent as an academic. He came to prominence as a professor at the London School of Economics, producing ground-breaking papers on tax which attracted the attention of Government officials.

By the end of the 1980s he had got a toehold at the Bank of England, as a member of its "court" or board. He finally joined the Bank as its chief economist in 1991.

It was Mr King who reinvented the bank’s dusty quarterly bulletins as highly-anticipated inflation reports for the world's financial press.

A huge sports fan, he peppered his latest speech presenting the report with cricket references, and once went so far as to arrange a game between Bank of England employees and ex-Villa players. Less obvious is Mr King's love of music.

As Governor, he has been criticised by one former Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member, David Blanchflower, as being "the old iron fist of the Bank of England''.Alternative opinions, Mr Blanchflower said, were given "short shrift''.

However another former MPC member, speaking on condition of anonymity, disagreed: "Mervyn does have a forceful and bullying personality but that's not the same as 'group think'. "It's always a risk on committees, but the structure of the MPC makes it the least likely to suffer from 'group think' because it has such a rapid turnover of external members.