Mark Carney’s irritation with Bernard Jenkin is understandable. The governor of the Bank of England has been scrupulous – painfully so, at times – to stick to what he is allowed to talk about in the run-up to the referendum.

He has confined himself to assessing the impact on monetary and financial stability, which Threadneedle Street is charged with promoting. It would be bizarre if the Bank had nothing to say about the referendum since nobody (surely) would pretend that Brexit would definitely have zero impact on the economy or financial markets, at least in the next couple of years, which is the horizon that most concerns the Bank when setting interest rates.

The most contentious part of the Bank’s assessment has been its statement that leaving the EU is the greatest risk to financial stability in the UK and could threaten a recession. To the ears of Brexiters, that will sound alarmist or dramatic – but it shouldn’t. The value of sterling is moving with every opinion poll and a possible sudden, sharp movement in the currency – even it reverses when investors realise Armageddon hasn’t arrived – means Threadneedle Street has to make preparations. It would not be doing its job otherwise.

Those preparations involve arranging funding operations to ensure banks have cash to cope with any short-term turmoil, even if the fears turn out to be overdone. The Bank can hardly keep those operations quiet, or decline to explain its thinking. In other words, it can’t pretend the referendum isn’t happening. Indeed, Andrew Tyrie – whose Treasury select committee prodded for referendum-related weaknesses in Carney’s defences – conceded that a “vow of omertà” would have resulted in a “bumpy hearing”.

Against that backdrop, the timing of the warning from Jenkin, the Vote Leave MP, that Carney should be “careful what he says” was especially absurd. First, the governor has been careful. Second, Thursday’s minutes of the latest meeting of monetary policy committee expressed the views of the entire nine-member panel.

Nor were the eye-catching lines from the minutes especially contentious if one read them as they were intended. Brexit is “possibly” the biggest risk to global markets? Well, yes, possibly it is. We won’t know unless it happens but the suggestion is reasonable and the nervousness in financial markets is obvious. Even the US Federal Reserve is talking about it. It would be odd if our own central bank had to wear a gag.

Spotlight turns on Goldman Sachs in BHS debacle

On one point Sir Philip Green and Dominic Chappell are in agreement: Goldman Sachs was the “gatekeeper” to the disastrous deal in which the Topshop billionaire sold BHS for £1 to the thrice bankrupt former motor racing driver.

It is only Goldman Sachs that is shy about saying it held the keys. Here is Anthony Gutman, head of UK investment banking, explaining his involvement to MPs a few weeks ago: it was unpaid and “our role was … limited to providing preliminary observations on the proposals received, nothing more”.

And: “They [Green’s Arcadia group] did not ask us to make judgments or provide recommendations, and nor could we in light of the very limited access we had and the nature of our role.”

Now here’s Green’s response when asked if he would have sold to Chappell if he had not passed Goldman’s “sniff” test: “We 1 million per cent would not have done business with him. If they [Goldman] had said, “don’t deal with this guy,” that would have been the end of it – otherwise, there is no point in having somebody – but that is not the advice that we got.”

Green, then, is clear that he was receiving advice from Goldman, whereas the bank thinks it was merely providing “observations”. This isn’t a matter of verbal niceties. The central player in the drama, Green, is saying Chappell was a credible buyer because Goldman said so, or at least because the bank raised no serious objections.

Indeed, Green laid it on thickly at Wednesday’s session before MPs, to the point of reading out Gutman’s congratulatory email to Chappell (“you deserve it and stuck to your word throughout”) when the deal was done. “That is hardly someone telling us not to deal with the guy, is it?” said Green – reasonably, on the face of it.

In the circumstances, it was astonishing that Michael Sherwood, co-head of Goldman in London, initially resisted MPs’ invitation to appear in person. The committees, rightly, are insisting that he, Gutman and fellow Goldmanite Michael Casey appear on 28 June.

Sherwood is an old chum of Green’s from the attempt to bid for Marks & Spencer in 2004. If he thinks Green has taken outrageous liberties in attaching Goldman’s name to Chappell’s credibility, he should say so.

He might tell us if Goldman told Green that if he wanted Chappell vetted thoroughly, he should hire a paid financial adviser with full access to information. Top folk at Goldman tend not to be naive fools. While sniffing around Chappell, they could surely smell the risk to the bank’s reputation.