He shares a nickname with one of Britain’s most renowned footballers, who captained Tottenham Hotspur to victory in their double-winning season of 1961. But Professor David “Danny” Blanchflower is famed for being the very opposite of a team player.

Over the past year, Professor Blanchflower has become celebrated as the man who predicted Britain’s present economic plight, and who repeatedly demanded interest rate cuts months before the downturn took hold with a vengeance. Those calls came in the teeth of fierce opposition from the rest of the Bank of England’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He is, in short, the man who saw the recession coming.

An outspoken and iconoclastic figure who has brought a dash of colour to the grey corridors of the Bank, Mr Blanchflower has a voting record on the MPC that is ample testimony to his having been proved right.

He began voting for rate cuts in October 2007, as the credit crunch that spawned the present slump took hold, and he carried on voting for cuts in every month of 2008. Yet, while the MPC trimmed rates from 5.5 per cent in January last year to 5 per cent by April, the professor remained a lone voice for further action until October – by which time, we now know, the recession had already been taking its toll for at least four, and perhaps as many as seven, months.

As he prepares to step down from the MPC this week, Mr Blanchflower is careful, despite all this, to avoid saying, “I told you so”. “I don’t think vindicated is the right word,” he says. “It’s a smug position. I don’t feel that in any way. I was fearful of what was coming and it turns out it has come. And I take no comfort in that.

“It is hard to feel vindicated when the economy is in a very difficult position and we are faced with a most enormous recession.”

He does not conceal, though, that his isolation – exacerbated by his retaining his post at Dartmouth University, New Hampshire, and commuting across the Atlantic – exacted a heavy personal cost. “It was extremely uncomfortable to be in a minority of one for a very long time. The worst bit was in the middle of August last year, feeling completely alone. I was a lone voice, and maybe a lost voice, maybe a lost cause. That was the worst part.”

For Mr Blanchflower this was the crunch point. His frustration grew that he was unable to convince colleagues that prospects were deteriorating fast, and that the supposed threat of rampant inflation was illusory. His sense of isolation and the futility of dissent was reinforced when the Bank unveiled August quarterly forecasts that he felt were hopelessly rose-tinted.

He insists the arguments on the MPC were “always very polite . . . professional disagreements”. He praises, too, “the MPC’s greatest strength that one can have a dissenting voice”.

Yet friends suggest that tensions, particularly with Mervyn King, the Bank’s formidable Governor, were not far from the surface. At a September hearing of the Commons Treasury Committee, Mr King poured scorn on Mr Blanchflower and his predictions of a surge in unemployment – predictions that have since proved correct. Associates say that the professor pondered going public over his private misgivings at the Bank’s strategy.

If he drew back from that, his August moment of doubt quickly passed. “I decided that I had to stand up and say that I thought we were behind the curve, and we needed to act, because something really bad was coming.”

Something bad was: the worst recession of the postwar era. Mr Blanchflower is disdainful of the version of events now painted by Mr King and others, that the crisis escalated with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, last September. “I don’t take Lehman as the crucial turning point because we were well in recession by that point. Certainly by spring 2008 we’d gone into recession and I could see that what was coming was a huge decline in demand around the world as financial markets were closing up.”

Mr Blanchflower is contemptuous, too, of the worries that fixated the MPC as late as last autumn when it feared that a jump in inflation, sparked by soaring fuel costs, could trigger a wage-price spiral.

“The earliest call I made was that there was no likelihood whatsoever of a wage explosion,” he says. “I was a lone voice. Now we’re seeing the biggest decline in wages we’ve ever seen.” He believes the Bank’s problem was that it was too narrowly focused on its inflation target: “It meant that we kept rates too high, for too long.” When, last October, the MPC finally began drastic cuts in interest rates, from 5 per cent to 0.5 per cent in six months, Mr Blanchflower could at last feel some relief. Officials say he punched the air exultantly in November, when rates were cut by 1½ points. But his relief was tempered by the knowledge that a faster response might have limited the damage: “It would have made a substantial difference if we’d been cutting earlier on.”

Now, as optimism swells that the worst of the recession is over and recovery beckons, he warns against complacency. “My worry is that there can be many false dawns and we shouldn’t just assume that everything is over.”

Huge challenges lie ahead, too, he argues, in overhauling the running of the world economy. “We have to have a rethink. You’re going to have to throw away lots of economics and start again. How can anybody not say that when we’ve had the greatest financial crisis in 100 years.”

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