SO it turned out to be the surge. On Tuesday, in this slot, I left open the possibility that Consumer Price Inflation in April might confound City expectations and lurch towards 3%, the ceiling of the Bank of England's operational range.

And so it did, hitting that ceiling after the biggest monthly surge in UK prices in six years. But much worse was to follow in yesterday's quarterly Inflation Report from the Bank.

If its latest grim projections come to be realised, CPI inflation will now rise above 3% and stay there for the rest of this year, at least. There is even a possibility of price rises spiking through the 4% level at some point.

"It is likely that, with inflation above 3% for several quarters," noted the Governor Mervyn King, "I will be required to write a number of open letters to the Chancellor over the next year."

What on earth is he going to say in this enforced, serial correspondence? So far, in the Bank's 11-year control of monetary policy, King has only had to pen a single missive, in March 2007.

However, once he's rehearsed all the reasons for CPI inflation straying so far from the Treasury-imposed target of 2% this time, should he just keep on repeating the same text, time and time again, save for changing the date at the top of the notepaper?

Or are we going to be privy to a genuine dialogue between Governor and Chancellor, about whether the 1997 monetary policy settlement is still fit for purpose now that, as King himself put it yesterday, "the nice decade is behind us"? At least for now.

The Governor's "nice" decade, you may recall, was the 10 years of non-inflationary, consistently expansionary, economic growth Britain enjoyed before he had to write that first letter.

But now, not only is the preferred measure of price inflation bursting beyond its permitted range and likely to stay there for quite some time, whatever the Bank might do on rates, growth is slowing sharply too.

And even if the Bank were to implement another two, quarter-point cuts in interest rates, as markets have been anticipating up till now, that would not, in the Bank's latest projections, prevent growth slowing to around 1% by the end of this year.

This is the worst of both worlds. And it has arrived as the Brown government is trying to claw its way back into contention for a fourth consecutive term, with a major climb down on the 10p tax debacle, which has left its own fiscal headroom perilously limited.

Everyone now expects the Prime Minister to delay calling the next Westminster general election to the last possible moment in the spring of 2010, precisely the timeframe on which these latest Bank projections have been set.

But there is precious little electoral comfort in where these projections are taking us. If the Bank's monetary policy committee were to cut rates further, to 4.5% say, by the end of this year, that might just enable UK growth to claw its way back over 2% by the first quarter of 2010.

But the consequence, in inflation terms, would mean that, on these projections, the CPI measure would still be above target, at around 2.2%, by election time. Even if interest rates were to stay at their current level, 5%, throughout the next two years, CPI inflation might just hit its target (2%) as the next election campaign got under way.

That's how fraught the outlook on all sides now is, as far as the Bank is concerned. However, it seems in little doubt about where its principal focus should lie. Launching the latest inflation report, King could not have been clearer. First he warned that, despite the "bumpy road" the UK economy must now traverse, as it rebalances away from spending and importing towards saving and exporting, "monetary policy cannot, and should not try to, prevent that adjustment."

Then he publicly restated the MPC's remit. "The real stability upon which economic prosperity is founded requires that inflation remain low and stable for a long period of time."

Be patient, he chided. But patience is in pretty short supply at Westminster, as Labour and the Tory Party slug it out in the brutal business of retaining - or grabbing - power.

Could it be that serial, open correspondence between King and Chancellor Alistair Darling which now promises to be such a feature of the rest of this year and possibly longer, might become the repository for all sorts of previously hidden tensions - after the nice decade, the nasty letters, as politician and central banker pursue their increasingly irreconcilable policy objectives.

It would certainly make for more engaging reading than the recent slew of political biographies - tittle-tattle masquerading as political insight.

Go on, Mervyn and Alistair, let's have a correspondence that lays it on the line on both sides. And Rupert Murdoch won't make a penny from it.