So farewell then, Professor David Blanchflower, who today stands down from the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, after three eventful years, to return to full time academia.

Agree with him or not – and I and many others have often railed against him – Blanchflower will be sorely missed from the MPC, and UK monetary policy will be all the poorer for his absence. If nothing else Blanchflower’s was an important voice of dissent in a body that increasingly tends towards bland uniformity.

Last summer, you will remember, Blanchflower emerged as something of an unlikely media darling after repeatedly clashing with his MPC colleagues over the direction of interest rates.

Put simply he wanted to cut them, while the rest of his colleagues were determined to keep them on hold or even jack them up. And he was very vocal about the horrendous mistake he thought the committee was making.

The argument centred around two things: the risk of an inflationary wage-spiral, and the essential role of the MPC. And on both counts Blanchflower thought his colleagues were profoundly mistaken.

The risk of a wage-price spiral was effectively zero, the professor said, despite the sharp increase in commodity prices and subsequent jump in consumer price inflation. And this was essentially because the economy was set for a precipitous fall, and because labour bargaining power was far weaker than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the last protracted wage-price spiral occurred.

And he was right, of course, about the second point in particular, and in retrospect we should perhaps have listened to him more. He was a specialist labour economist after all, and this was essentially an argument about labour power. As for the coming economic crisis he was also right, though whether slashing interest rates in the summer would have helped counter this is a matter of debate.

The second point of contention was less clear cut, and arguably touched on the very raison d’etre of the MPC. For while the rest of the MPC remained determined to stick to its core task of keeping the headline inflation rate at 2% or 1% either side, Blanchflower wanted the committee to exercise the get-out clause in its remit, the one that says: