Danny Blanchflower, apart from being a fine footballer for Tottenham Hotspur and Northern Ireland, is also remembered for being the first celebrity to snub This Is Your Life.

Confronted in 1961 by presenter Eamonn Andrews and his Big Red Book, on live television, Blanchflower said: “I consider this programme to be an invasion of privacy. Nobody is going to press gang me into anything.”

Unfortunately, his near-namesake David Blanchflower, who steps down in May, was unable to pressgang his teammates on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) into supporting his views on the economy.

For the past 14 MPC meetings, Professor Blanchflower voted to reduce interest rates, arguing that tackling the weak state of the economy was a greater priority than facing down what appeared to him to be only a short-term blip in inflation. The arch-dove even said last January that the stand of the rest of the MPC, in worrying about inflation, was “like fiddling while Rome burns”.

Regrettably, the rest of the MPC took the opposite view until October, when it unanimously voted to cut Bank rate by half a percentage point – precisely the same reduction that Professor Blanchflower had urged the previous month.

In being vindicated, Professor Blanchflower has been incredibly gracious, although a recent admission to suffering “a lot of sleepless nights” hints at how stressful was the isolation and the criticism frequently accompanying it. This, plus the pressure of commuting from New Hampshire to London for the MPC’s monthly meetings, seems to have taken its toll.

It is fair to speculate that, while Professor Blanchflower will be happy to avoid a further three years of transatlantic commuting, Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor, and his MPC colleagues must be equally relieved that he will shortly no longer be present to remind them, as the crisis worsens, of their failure to cut Bank rate more aggressively sooner. Meanwhile, as Professor Blanchflower heads to the dressing room, the elevation of Paul Tucker to deputy governor looks a crowd-pleaser.

The Bank’s former head of markets is highly regarded in the City and, with his career path emulating that of the former governor Eddie George, few would bet against Mr Tucker eventually holding that post, too. The fact that Mr Tucker has won the second deputy governorship, as opposed to a Bank outsider, will also do wonders for staff morale.

Mr Tucker is a hard man – he once allowed a buyer for his flat to be gazumped – but his expertise in markets and his wide network of City contacts makes him invaluable in the post. He succeeds Sir John Gieve, whose departure was leaked by Treasury spinners before the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in June, conveniently upstaging a gloomy economic update at that event from Alistair Darling.

All this activity leaves the MPC two members down – a successor for Professor Blanchflower and a new head of markets – and how these posts will be filled will be watched more closely than usual.

Before the recent emergency easing, there were plenty of hints from the Treasury that the MPC was not moving fast enough for its liking, so the temptation to make a nakedly political appointment will be harder to resist than usual.

It is to be hoped the newcomers make their mark as Professor Blanchflower did and, indeed, with the same spirit of the original Danny Blanchflower, who once said: “We aim to equalise before the other team score. We should get our retaliation in first.”

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