One winner up in . . .
MARGARET Thatcher would have liked to install Sir Peter Middleton as Governor of the Bank of England. The opportunity never quite presented itself — nor am I clear that Sir Peter, as Permanent Secret- ary to the Treasury, would have been ready to swap. The Treasury tends to regard the Bank as a parvenu institution, some 600 years its junior. As the Dialogue observed in the year 1177: 'The institution of the Treasury is confirmed well by its antiquity and also by the authority of the great men who sit there.' Sir Peter has sat in authority for eight years, and never planned to sit it out to retirement age — as I was saying two summers ago, in my ante-post assessment of the odds on the next running of the Treasury Stakes. I was trying (as I told you) to get my money on Sir Terence Burns, the chief economic adviser, who had suddenly been made an established civil servant — and not just, I thought, to get him a badge for the Treasury car-park. Now he has romped home, and I hope that you, too, cleaned up.
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