Mervyn's not for swervin'. That was the core message behind the Governor of the Bank of England's appearance before the Treasury Select Committee.

In the good old pre-crisis days, Mr King would have told us that he was as steady as a rock. Now that would just make everyone howl with laughter.

I am not sure that anyone has ever howled with laughter over anything Mervyn King has said. He is a donnishly serious man. So much so that at times it is comical. This is not helped by him looking almost cuddly, like an academic troll with little round specs and a rather expensive haircut. But he does not wear power lightly: it clings to him, as tough as a suit of armour.

He was very reassuring about the economy, so much so that it was rather worrying. “I don't want to deny that I would expect as a central view that there would be a slowdown this year and into 2009,” he said. I found the phrase “I don't want to deny” almost sinister. And what about that word “slowdown”? It sounded positively harmless and not like a financial car wreck at all.

Mr King says the slowdown that he does not want to deny is a “rebalancing”.

“That's not a disaster in itself,” he noted. At this, I immediately thought it might be a disaster. Otherwise, why say it at all?

Then, as if reading my mind, he chided: “A sense of perspective is required.” Now this was getting irritating. That is what parents say to a teenager when they are threatening to commit hara-kiri over a spot. Besides, why do we need perspective? I thought what we needed were cheaper mortgages. But even as I had that thought, Mr King was talking me out of it: “I don't think we should cry doom and gloom.”

OK, you win, Mr Sunny-Side-Up. The slowdown that will lead to a rebalancing is not a disaster. Mr King says one of the reasons that he's so sure of this is that the banking culture is changing. Young men fuelled by greed and testosterone have been humbled.

Yes, they have. Don't laugh. Mr King knows these things. Indeed, he can be quite precise about it. He says that hubris died in March 2008, a statement perhaps only equalled for sheer baldness by Philip Larkin's observation that sexual intercourse began in 1963. Mr King knows that it is gone because he is very censorious of hubris and can smell it even with only one nostril. “The balance changed in March,” he noted. “Hubris had disappeared.”

It was then, and only then, that he felt he could provide his £50 billion package to the banks. “I decided at that point it was sensible to provide liquidity but we will have to ensure through a combination of regulation, speeches, monitoring and I hope a change in the culture of what goes on in the banking sector, that we do not see a repeat of this hubris and the excessive lending and creation of financial instruments that turned out to be flat whatever it said on the bottle.”

Well, hubris may have died in the banking sector, noted one MP, but what about Mr King's? “What about your own overconfidence?”

Mervyn blinked. “That's something for you to form a judgment. I have not changed my view about what I did in the past.”

Did he have regrets? It was an Edith Piaf moment and, like her, when it comes to the big decisions, the answer was “non”. I wonder what that guy Hubris would say about that.

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