IT WAS always obvious that Gordon Brown had no time for the Ken and Eddie show, that wonderful once a month Whitehall farce in which the former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke would listen to what Governor Eddie George and his aides had to say about interest rates and then ignore it. But little did we know that the run of its successor the Gordon and Eddie show - would be limited to one solitary performance.

As from next month, the way interest rate decisions are made in Britain will change, probably for ever. If the Governor of the Bank of England and his colleagues on a new monetary policy committee decide that the control of inflation means that the cost of borrowing has to go up, then go up it will. The Chancellor, even if he has serious misgivings, will just have to lump it.

The motivation behind the move is a good one. Mr Brown wants to improve Britain's economic performance and bring down unemployment. He wants to put an end to the boombust cycle that has bedeviled both Labour and Conservative governments for the past 30 years or more. He wants to embed lower inflation so that interest rates can come down and investment can go up.

All this and more was contained in his ground breaking statement earlier this week, which kicked off with a quote from the 1944 White Paper that ushered in the post war Keynesian era. "The central economic objectives of the new government are high and stable levels of growth and employment," Mr Brown intoned in his first public words as Chancellor from behind a Clintonesque podium.

But potentially there are major draw backs. The first of these involves the democratic legitimacy of handing over operational control of monetary policy to an unelected body. Last week, more than 13 million people voted for a Labour government; the name of Edward Arthur John George - Eddie George, the bank's governor - was not on the ballot paper anywhere.

On the last occasion Labour had a whopping majority, it decided that the first thing it had to do was to nationalise the Bank. Some 52 years on, virtually its first act is to grant the Old Lady her freedom.

It is conceivable, just, that a future government may decide to take back full control of monetary policy, but only in a dire national emergency, or if the Bank of England makes an almighty hash of its new job.

THIS throws up the second worry. Will the Bank be any good at running monetary policy? When Mr Brown originally floated his idea, he said that operational independence for the Bank would depend on it building up a good track record for forecasting. This, it has not yet done. One of the interesting points about the Ken and Eddie show - indeed, the aspect that gave it its piquancy - was that Mr Clarke was better at calling the state of the economy than Mr George.

Over the coming months, the newly unfettered Bank will almost certainly push base rates higher, even though Mr George readily admits that the current level of sterling is uncomfortably high. Mr Brown's advisers believe that some of the fears about the Bank are misplaced, and that all will become clearer in the Budget planned for early July. It would undoubtedly be helpful if the steam were taken out of the economy via tax increases rather than higher borrowing costs, but the new division of labour between the Bank and the Treasury will make it more difficult to ensure coordination of policy.

Little of this has mattered to the City of London, which took the view that Bank independence guaranteed lower inflation. But as Gerard Lyons, chief economist with the Japanese bank DKB, argued, the evidence for this is slim. Australia and New Zealand both have low inflation, yet one has an independent bank and the other does not. The same applies to Japan and Germany.

ULTIMATELY, the success of central bank independence will depend on two things - the calibre of the people making the decisions and the underlying structure of the economy, including the way its wage bargaining system operates. Gordon Brown and his team insist that these are both being addressed, not least because depoliticising monetary policy will give the Chancellor more time to devote to the economy's long standing supply side weaknesses.

But he had better be sure he is right. For the political drawback of yesterday's move is obvious. If this all goes wrong, and in two years time Bank independence has resulted in low growth, an extra 500,000 on the dole and a 10 point Tory lead in the opinion polls, somebody's head is going to be on the block.