actively to dislike bankers. City financiers who have met him claim to be gobsmacked by the disdain in which he holds their profession.

In April he said he found it distasteful that so many young people were lured by money into a City career, and how much he preferred the company of entrepreneurs and small businessmen who actually did things. These may be perfectly understandable sentiments, but in a Bank of England chief they are unhelpful.

This is especially the case at the present time when what is needed is to save the system not to punish the miscreants for their unmeritorious conduct. That can wait for later.

The most successful governors have been those who have rolled up their sleeves and found out what was actually going through the minds of those that they were regulating. King, an austere academic economist, is not the sort to prop up the bar with the traders at the Slug and Lettuce in Threadneedle Street. And it shows.

It is said that King finds it hard to countenance views contrary to his own because he genuinely thinks he is right. He still believes that the Bank conquered inflation in the UK. He refuses to accept that it was the countless Chinese factory workers who were the real heroes of the story.

Instead of providing leadership, King is cut off from the troops under him

He has also surrounded himself at the Bank with too many academic economists who think like him and have no experience of real banking. His management style is not heroic. When things have gone wrong - as with the Rock - he shifted the blame onto subordinates.

The fear is that, despite some hesitant first steps on King's long march, there is a chance that it may be a case of too little too late.

The lesson of Japan's 'lost decade' of deflation was that central bankers need to cut interest rates quickly when asset bubbles burst to forestall the risk of consumer deflation - a poisonous situation where prices start to fall, encouraging people to defer spending and pushing the economy into a slump.

If the UK is now poised uncomfortably close to the brink, King must bear some of the blame.

Instead of providing leadership on this long march, King looks cut off from the troops under his command - the City financiers and branch bankers. He doesn't much like them, and they don't have much confidence in him.

He seems congenitally incapable of making rallying speeches, perhaps because of his fundamental intellectual honesty. His tone is resolutely Eeyore-ish.

Just take a few of his recent themes - about how we came closer to collapse than at any time since World War One, about how more banks may need to be nationalised, or about how we face a 'nasty' decade following the 'nice' one.

Candour is fine - so long as it is followed by decisive action. The tragedy is that King has provided too much of the former, and not enough of the latter.