I knew James Robertson quite well 30 years ago. A few years previously, he had been Macmillan's Principal Private Secretary when M was Prime Minister. James was thus a very high-flyer civil servant and only about two levels below Cabinet Secretary -- that is, the highest civil servant in the country. He was seconded to Interbank, which was a failed forerunner of the European Central Bank. He left this project when it getting nowhere because of resistance from the Deutschebank and other central banks. He then retired from the civil service in his mid-fifties. I was not a close friend of James but we met and talked together many times because for some years we both spoke at the same sorts of conferences and were often on the platform together. JR was a very austere man of the highest intellectual calibre, but there was one thing that intrigued me enormously for someone who'd been at the highest establishment levels. This was that during his time with Interbank he had learned -- apparently for the first time in his life -- that central banks could, in fact, print their own money. He would refer to this time and time again in private conversation as being a great confidence trick of governments and I rather think that this was the final straw that radicalised him. I read "Power, Money and Sex" a very long time ago and have long lost it from my bookshelves. I can't remember the contents but I guess the book contains quite a lot about his disillusionment with banking (that is, central banking) as well as the civil service in that book.
Keith Hudson ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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