Mark Carney
Mark Carney on Brexit, the Bank of England and fighting climate change
When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney won friends (and enemies) as he steered the country through the worst of the financial crisis. Now he’s turning his talents to global climate change. Just don’t call him a tree-hugger
In the spring of 2018, I was viewing the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern in London with Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank of England. We were in a group guided by a curator who stopped at an endless number of paintings to ask, “Can you see here the imagery representing Picasso’s penis?” To focus our attention, he gestured up and down with his hand. On the fifth or sixth occasion, the curator stopped by a big painting of a reclining woman in purples and pinks and asked again if we could see “the penis extending here, from the face and head”. At that moment I caught the governor’s eye and I corpsed. “Are you absolutely sure,” Carney deadpanned when we were released from the earnest tour, “that you could see the penises?”
You see, Mark Carney is funnier than you might have imagined if you’d just seen him on TV, talking about quantitative easing and banking regulation, those three lines across his brow appearing themselves to underscore the serious state of the UK’s economic health. Maybe you were concentrating on his analysis of the productivity gap, or maybe you were confused by just how unusually attractive he is for a central banker, what a well-cut blue suit he had on, what well-cut silver-flecked hair and what glorious mischief – in addition to the gravity, of course – that face brought to the television news.
The blue suit is on today, worn Macron-style with an open-neck white shirt, when I meet him at the BBC, where he is recording the first of his four Reith Lectures, to be broadcast in early December. The 55-year-old is now the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for climate action and finance, a role weaved into his lectures, which are about how to put values back into economic value.
read the full article on The Times
