Facing a grilling from MPs at the Treasury Select Committee hearing, King said reports he called for Diamond to be sacked were false, although he did confirm the Bank had lost confidence in Diamond.
The governor was asked by Andrew Tyrie: “You handed the chairman a revolver and asked him to shoot the chief executive?”
King responded: “I don’t like these firearms analogies, they are absolutely false.
“I made it clear to the chairman that I was not speaking on behalf of the regulators. I wanted to raise my concerns.
“Barclays’ board was deeply reluctant to face up to our concerns, they thought they might be able to tough it out. But I put it to them very clearly that we had lost confidence in executive management.”
The comments come after the revelation King contacted Marcus Agius – Barclays’ outgoing chairman – days before Diamond resigned, to inform him that he had lost the confidence of the regulator.
Tyrie added better governance was needed to cover meetings between the regulator and the Bank of England in future, but King rebuffed the calls.
He added deputy governor Paul Tucker had not known about the call between King and Agius.
King said he had consulted the Bank’s legal adviser before the call. “I discussed it with our chief legal adviser, but not with deputy governors. He told me what I could and could not say,” he said.
“You don’t need to have governance to have a conversation,” added King
The governor also insisted he had no previous knowledge of the LIBOR wrongdoing.
“The first I knew of LIBOR wrongdoing was when FSA reports came out two weeks ago. The NY Fed did not raise any evidence of wrongdoing with regards to LIBOR.
“None of us had any evidence of wrongdoing. Any self-reporting scheme had to have structures to report mis-reporting, but that doesn’t mean mis-reporting was going on.”
