Back in May, I speculated in a piece about the breakdown of Labour-Lib Dem coalition talks, on whether “establishment figures” — such as, say, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King — may have leaned on Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, with a view to ensuring a Conservative-led government.
My punt came at a time when some rather odd incidents were occurring, such as a Facebook page with hundreds of supporters urging Clegg not to get into bed with the Tories mysteriously disappearing from the site. But I had no way of knowing for sure that King had spoken to Clegg.
This morning, at the Commons Treasury select committee hearing from where I send this, King has just admitted he did indeed speak to Clegg — by phone — but claims he told him nothing about the economy that was not in the public domain. King was being questioned by the Labour MP Chuka Umunna.
Clegg, meanwhile, maintains he found out things about the scale of problems in the economy that helped cause him to change his position on cuts to tackle the deficit.
What Clegg was told, and by whom, remain crucial pieces of information for anyone interested in not just how we ended up with the coalition we now have, but also in who runs Britain.
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