This is like one of those moments when you get somebody to look under the bonnet of your car because it has been making a strange noise and seems incapable of maintaining any sort of speed. The mechanic takes a look and emerges with a shake of the head. Some serious damage has been done and it is going to be hard to fix. Better find some alternative arrangements.

In the case of the economy, the man with the oily rag is Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, assisted by his colleagues on the monetary policy committee (MPC), and the bad news he delivered was in the Bank’s latest inflation report.

Let me make clear what I mean by the bad news. It was