Has the rug really been pulled from under Mark Carney?

The heated debate about whether or not Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has engaged in a humiliating climbdown over his forward guidance on interest rates is destined to sink beneath the waves of flooding news.

Which is probably not a bad thing.

The debate is an important one, but was being turned into an egotistical contest about who knew most about UK monetary policy: a Canadian bank governor or City scribblers.

The scribblers appear to have decided long ago that Carney was an outsider who'd blundered. After all, what on earth was this suspiciously slick Canadian doing making his first major announcement about policy in Nottingham of all places?

This was where, last August, he said the Bank wouldn't even consider putting up interest rates until the unemployment rate fell to 7%.

This was breaking new ground on two fronts. First, it meant the Bank was no longer tied by inflation – it had another factor to consider. Second, Mr Carney was a whole lot more open about what he meant (finding meaning in an interview with Mervyn King, his predecessor, was like searching for a needle in a haystack).

Mr Carney's view was that the Bank needed to lose its lofty air, get out into the economy and explain to worried consumers and uncertain businesses that it wasn't going to do anything which would torpedo a fragile recovery they would depend on for jobs, wages and revenue.

If you look back, you'll see that he dropped plenty of hints to suggest that seven per cent was far from an automatic threshold. It was, he said in an interview with the Nottingham Post, "only a staging post" and "No one should assume that it is a trigger for raising rates".

He also made another important point, one with which few would disagree: that the Bank's decision on interest rates would not be dominated by the strength of the economy in London and the South East, which is on a different level to the rest of the country.

Remember his comment: "Nottingham is the bellwether of the broader British economy. It is not over-weighted with finance, we get enough of that perspective in London."

This is one the City scribblers would do well to dwell on. Mr Carney may have been caught out by the speed with which the unemployment rate has plunged close to a 7% national average. But it remains significantly above that level in some regions, the recovery that is clearly motoring ahead in the South East remains patchy elsewhere.

Similarly, the debts that lie underneath many households (and some businesses)haven't miraculously disappeared.

Confidence is coming back, for sure, and the Bank's new GDP growth forecast for this year – north of 3% - signals real momentum.

But don't get lost in debates about whether the precise nature of Mr Carney's forward guidance was right or wrong.

Economists are now expecting the first rate rise to take place in Spring 2015, with the base rate having risen to a forecast 2% by 2017.

Whatever technical changes have taken place, Mark Carney's most telling comment in Nottingham was – and remains – this: "As you see things picking up, don't worry that the rug is going to be pulled out from under you too soon."