C ENTRAL BANKERS usually keep a low profile. Most like nothing more than to spend hours in dingy meeting rooms poring over the latest data on wages or petrol prices. Not Andy Haldane. The Bank of England’s chief economist has written for the London Review of Books, fodder for middle-class dinner parties. He has argued that the Occupy protesters of 2011-12 were right to focus on problems of the global financial system. Lately his profile has risen further. Some of those who are close to the bank and to John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, think that a Labour government might choose Mr Haldane to lead the 324-year-old institution.

The role of chief economist has grown in recent years. Previous holders of the job, including Lord King, who went on to become governor, focused on monetary policy. But under Mr Haldane the role has broadened to include responsibility for building the bank’s research, analysis and data-gathering capabilities. On top of that heavy workload the 51-year-old, who attended a comprehensive school in Leeds before studying economics at Sheffield and Warwick universities, has founded an organisation which links economists with charitable projects. Last month he was appointed (in a personal capacity) to chair the government’s Industrial Strategy Council, a new body that will monitor progress on improving Britain’s low rate of productivity growth.

In his big office at the bank, Mr Haldane thinks big thoughts. He was one of the first economists in Britain to cotton on to the fact that, as in America, the market power of large companies appears to have risen in recent years. And he has excited radical economists by musing about whether it might be a good idea to abolish cash, and arguing that weak trade unions damage Britons’ pay. During a recent interview with The Economist he got on to the subject of “why it was that humans were able to chart a very different evolutionary course to all other animals.”

Even in the more mundane area of monetary policy, Mr Haldane has been making waves of late. He was once happy “to be perceived as towards the dovish end of the spectrum,” as he puts it, meaning that he was thought likely to favour lower interest rates. In June 2017, however, he delivered a speech which caught traders by surprise, arguing that “the balance of risks associated with tightening too early, on the one hand, and too late, on the other, has swung materially towards the latter.” Since then he has voted to raise interest rates three times, compared with twice for the monetary-policy committee as a whole. These days traders view him as the second-most hawkish member of the nine-person MPC .

What explains Mr Haldane’s hawkish turn? He demurs. “It’s not like my preferences around the economy have changed.” The depreciation of sterling since the Brexit referendum of 2016 has raised the cost of imports, pushing consumer-price inflation well above the bank’s 2% target. Mr Haldane noted a “shift in inflation expectations” in the speech in June 2017.

But he seems to place more weight on developments in the domestic economy. The unemployment rate is near a four-decade low, at 4.1%. Firms appear to be competing harder to attract and retain workers. In a speech last month Mr Haldane pointed out that “wage forecasts [are] no longer undershooting”. Private-sector pay growth, excluding bonuses, is running at about 3% a year in nominal terms. “We’re not talking about…chocks away,” he says. But in an era of low productivity growth, the additional employment costs on businesses from even weak wage-growth risk causing higher inflation across the economy.

In Mr Haldane’s view soft data complement the hard kind. Lately the bank has tried to engage more with the general public. Mr Haldane has attended town-hall meetings up and down the country, where ordinary people give their views on the economy. “Conversations with people, both on the employer and on the employee side, convinced me that this was indeed a generalised tightening,” he argues. For years British workers have managed to get a decent pay rise only if they change jobs. Increasingly, however, it seems that they are able to get them even if they stick with their current employer.

Predicting who will be the bank’s next governor is a mug’s game. (“It’s for others to speculate,” Mr Haldane sighs.) Yet the chief economist’s apparent hawkish turn might not hurt his chances. Choosing a governor with a reputation for monetary tightness could help a Labour government avoid giving investors the impression that it might debase the currency. “It’s such a key appointment,” points out Mathew Lawrence of Common Wealth, a think-tank that is close to Labour. “The bank can firewall a Labour domestic agenda if it acts to stabilise any market reactions.” In the coming years Britain could be hearing a lot more from the Bank of England’s maverick.