When my old friend Mervyn King completed his 10-year term as governor of the Bank of England in June 2013, I was deputed, as one of the older journalists who attended his press conferences over the years, to make some farewell remarks.

I praised him for the frank, even-handed and (almost) always enlightening way in which he had handled the press conferences associated with the Bank’s regular inflation reports and the deliberations of the monetary policy committee the governor chairs. And I meant it.

The scene shifts to the other week, when I turned on my car radio halfway through a Today programme interview and found my self listening to what sounded like yet another Brexiter MP, or possibly a rightwing businessman, expatiating on the supposed wonders of a no-deal Brexit.

A rightwing businessman? Yes, because although most of our leading businesses are issuing desperate warnings about the damage already being wrought by the mere prospect of Brexit, there are those, such as James Dyson and that ubiquitous Wetherspoon boss, who have been only too happy to join the evangelical band of Brexiter fantasists.

But no: it wasn’t one of them. It saddens me to say that the interviewee was none other than my old friend Mervyn, now Lord, King. The way in which he was laughing at the very idea that Brexit was economically damaging was an indirect riposte to his successor, Mark Carney, who has made no bones about the threats to this country’s economy – and who, to my mind, is playing a blinder as governor in these terrible times.

I was planning to come to his support today, but Carney has come to his own support, quite rightly. In an interview with Sky News, while diplomatically not mentioning King by name, he lambasted his predecessor’s claim that the government could easily prepare for a no-deal Brexit by spending six months arranging interim trade agreements in accordance with WTO rules. “Just like that,” as the late comedian-conjuror Tommy Cooper used to say.

Many Remainers harbour doubts about the way the EU operates. But economic self-harm is not the route to sensible reform

We know what a Whitehall farce our ridiculous trade secretary Liam Fox has made of trying to arrange a handful of trade deals in the past three years. As Carney said of King’s proposal: “It’s absolute nonsense. It needs to be called out.”

The Bank has been making preparations to ensure that, in the event of our crashing out of the EU, there won’t be a financial crisis. But Carney points out that this “doesn’t mean asset prices aren’t going to change [and] the currency isn’t going to change”. I infer that in this instance “change” is a euphemism for “fall” or even “collapse”.

In his poem The Lost Leader, Robert Browning wrote that great line: “Never glad confident morning again”. This of course applies to our two recent leaders, David Cameron and Theresa May. I fear with the former governor it is a case of “even-handed no more”.

Many of us Remainers harbour doubts about the way the EU operates. So do our fellow Europeans, whose patience “the Brits” have stretched to the limit. But embarking on a policy of economic self-harm is hardly the route to sensible reforms in Europe. Moreover, with Trump trying to break up the EU so that he is in a better position to bully individual nations – a core part of his mercantilist strategy – and Putin sowing discord for geopolitical reasons, we could be playing into their hands if we left the union.

One of the leading Remain thinktanks is the Centre for European Reform (CER), whose very name denotes an acceptance that all is not right with the EU. But its work shows that leaving is not the answer.

Even before the calamity that almost certainly awaits us if King, Jacob Rees-Mogg et al have their way, the CER finds that in the period from the referendum on 23 June 2016 to December 2018, the UK economy became 2.5% smaller than it would have been if we had voted to Remain. The CER states: “The knock-on hit to the public finances is £19bn per annum – or £360m a week.” Does £360m a week remind you of another figure? That’s right: one of the many lies of the Leave campaign was that the NHS would benefit by £350m a week.

Brexit uncertainty meant, as the CER says, that “the UK missed out on the global mini-boom in 2017 and 2018, with nearly all advanced economies bar Britain experiencing faster growth than they had previously. Brexit will curb growth in the future because trade and investment with the EU will fall.”

It is not difficult to agree with the former governor that Britain’s political class appears to have suffered “a collective nervous breakdown”, but Dr King’s cure is not the answer.