Strategically, Andrew Bailey and the Bank of England may have felt there was little
Strategically, Andrew Bailey and the Bank of England may have felt there was little choice but to catch up with the markets and deliver a punishing half a percentage point rise in borrowing costs to 5 per cent.
After all, inflation stubbornly has refused to come down as the Bank confidently predicted, and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has given the green light to a flash of steel.
The Government knows it is in the last chance saloon. If rising prices cannot be stopped in their tracks, the disarray in the public finances will get worse and the window for an economic turnabout will be snuffed out.
Bailey and his loyal and mistaken band of followers on the interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee are too late in applying scare tactics.
Under the Bank's very nose, there has been a wage explosion, with average weekly earnings up 7.6 per cent over the last three months.
Moreover, the jump in official rates is only playing catch-up with markets, as home owners looking down the barrel of mortgage re-financing will know to their cost.
From the first frantic day when Bailey took over the tiller in March 2020, as much of the global economy went into shutdown, the Bank diverted away from its core remit that the inflation target applies at all times.
The governor saw himself as the ultimate saviour of the economy, dreaming up schemes to prevent the scarring of business and keeping the monetary faucets wide open.
One doesn't have to be a devotee of monetarism to recognise that, over time, holding interest rates at artificially low levels and pumping extra resources into the economy, using the black box of quantitative easing, would be distorting.
Indeed, Bailey was so focused on supporting output, employment and business in volatile times that he went as far as writing to the commercial banks asking how they might be affected by negative interest rates.
Negative rates, used in Japan and the eurozone, are intended to encourage the banks to lend and boost production rather than hoard cash.
A reading of the Bank's monetary policy summary shows a subtle change in language.
In May, the Bank noted that it had departed from its remit to deal with 'a sequence of very large and overlapping shocks', such as Covid-19 and Russia's war on Ukraine. In its June report, the language about responding to such events has disappeared.
It is recognition that while it is important to act in emergencies, putting the inflation target to one side over long periods in favour of loose money is a basic error.
Treasury 'group think' on the Monetary Policy Committee led to a delayed and feeble response to rising inflation, long after it was clear that price rises were not transitory, and it must feared that the MPC may be wrong again.
In the determination to show it is being decisive in the face of the stickiness of consumer prices, surging service sector costs and rising core inflation, it has panicked and taken a step too far.
It is no coincidence that it is largely the bank insiders, most of whom served in the Treasury (and Goldman Sachs!), who supported a half-point rise.
In so doing, the Bank risks raising interest rate expectations even further and delivering far more pain than necessary. Indeed, it feeds into Labour's crude suggestion of a Tory interest rate penalty.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, a former Bank of England insider, cannot have it both ways.
They declare fealty to the Bank's remit and independence (after all, a Labour creation) while blaming the Government for an extra cost borne of the Old Lady's failure to control inflation.
Starmer and colleagues are partly to blame themselves, by their refusal to condemn the damaging rail, postal and public sector strikes where the workforce have been seeking inflation-busting 1970s-style agreements.
My sympathy is with the two women dissenters on the interest rate committee, LSE economics professors Swati Dhingra and Silvana Tenreyro.
They voted for no change. It was argued that the energy price shock will reverse in 2023 and that lags and delays in the way monetary policy works mean that the impacts of the 13-consecutive increases in borrowing costs have not had sufficient time to work.
A pause may have been politically awkward. But it might have avoided smothering optimism and the flicker of recovery.