Mark Carney has doubled-down on his warning of UK economic peril if Britain voted to leave the EU - claiming 'Brexit' campaigners were in "denial" over the economic impact.
On Thursday, the governor of the Bank of England warned a Leave vote on June 23 could lead to a fall in the value of the pound and push Britain into recession, leading to Tory eurosceptic MP Jacob Rees-Mogg to call for him to resign.
But on The Andrew Marr Show, the boss of the UK's central bank defended his intervention and once more laid out the risks to growth and inflation.
"This is the difference between denial and transparency," he said of the Bank's position.
The comment was seized in by the Chancellor, George Osborne.
The official Remain campaign, Stronger In, jumped on the same phrase.
Carney added the Bank of England had a “responsibility” to speak out about the risks to stability.
"We don't just have a responsibility to the British people to be fair and not pop up after a vote and say 'by the way this is what we thought at the time'," he told Andrew Marr.
"We also have a responsibility to explain risks and then take steps because by explaining what we would do to mitigate them we reduce them, and that is the key point."
He added: "Ignoring a risk is not to reduce it."
On the Sunday Politics show, former Cabinet minister and 'Brexit' campaigner Iain Duncan Smith questioned Carney's impartiality.
"The Governor has strayed now into the expression of what is simple personal prediction," he said, and alluded to the seemingly strange coincidence that "suddenly the ex-French minister and head of the IMF comes out with a similar prediction on Friday about a global crash".
He added: "These are the same people a few weeks ago who were telling us all the UK is too small to leave and too insignificant. Now we are so significant that we are going to plunge the whole world into an economic crash."
On the Marr show, Tory MP Andrea Leadsom, one of the Vote Leave campaign's senior economic voices and a Government minister, launched a fierce attack on Carney’s "incredibly dangerous intervention".
“To get involved in some purely speculative ‘what might happen, what might households do, what might businesses do’, that’s just not inside their remit," she said. They’re not there to promote financial instability and that’s what they’ve done...
“I suspect that the Governor will be significantly regretting getting involved in politics, destabilising the markets in the exact opposite way he should do, and I’m quite sure he will be wishing he hadn’t done it.”