Mervyn King was not always the toast of the City when he was governor of the Bank of England. But some senior City folk will have been silently applauding after he launched a scathing attack on central banks’ approach to climate change.

Lord King said the “new generation” of central bankers (surely he can’t mean his successor, Mark Carney?) were straying into areas like climate change that were properly the government’s job. They were being distracted from their core task of combatting sluggish global growth, he told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.