Firstly, interest rates here would have little impact on the global pressures that have blown up. Changing Britain’s rates would not ease global supply chain problems, for instance, or spare British households and businesses from soaring energy prices in international markets.

“We have been hit by a very large shock, which is a shock from outside,” Bailey told MPs in February. “There is nothing that we can do to offset that shock.”

Secondly, the MPC had to wait to see what happened with furlough, which only came to an end last October. With around 1m people still using the job retention scheme, it was not then obvious that unemployment would continue to fall back to the pre-Covid low of 3.8pc, as happened in the three months to February.

“With the benefit of hindsight, you can barely see that in the labour market data,” said Bailey in February. But when he voted to hold interest rates at 0.1pc in November, “far more jobs were using the furlough scheme right up until its end state than we expected”, raising worries over large-scale unemployment.

And thirdly, interest rates only affect inflation with a lag: to have much impact on inflation now, the Bank would have had to tighten policy in the teeth of the first lockdown – hardly a realistic proposition given the country was in its deepest recession for centuries.

In February, Broadbent said that acting early enough to keep inflation down now would have required the Bank to have foreseen the surge in gas prices 18 months in advance, “and to have raised interest rates bang in the middle… of the first wave of the pandemic and the lockdown.”

The consequences of doing that might well have been far worse than the pain of high inflation, he argued.

“Because of the unavoidable nature of the consequences for real income, that would not have improved real income now,” he said. “In order to keep inflation down close to target, even assuming we had that foresight and tightened policy very aggressively in the middle of 2020, the means by which we would have pushed inflation down would have involved much lower wage growth and higher unemployment.”

But the Bank has now started raising rates, three times so far, taking the base rate from 0.1pc to 0.75pc.

Financial markets expect more to come, with rates heading to 2pc by the end of the year and 2.5pc by next March.

Economists worry that by waiting this long, however, the Bank now has to react with rapid rate rises – to the economy’s detriment.

“This puts the Bank of England in a tight spot – balancing growth and inflation,” says Paul Hollingsworth at BNP Paribas.

“We think for the time being inflation concerns will dominate and today’s data gives us even more conviction that the MPC will hike rates again in May.”

That threat to growth is precisely Haldane’s worry from last year.

As he warned, failing to raise rates in time results “in policy needing to be tightened more than expected, causing future losses of jobs and incomes”.