City profile

BoE front runners

The appointment of the next Bank of England governor may have been postponed until after the general election, but that hasn’t stopped feverish speculation, said Jim Armitage in the London Evening Standard. By late last week, three names were being talked about as front runners for the job, “which is in the gift of the Chancellor”: Dame Minouche Shafik (pictured), Raghuram Rajan (formerly head of the Reserve Bank of India) and Sir Paul Tucker. Shafik, currently the director of the London School of Economics, is a former deputy governor with previous form at the IMF and World Bank. She clearly has the experience to become the Bank’s first female governor. “But it would be madness to put money on anyone in this race.”

The field of “appointable” candidates is still wider than many assume, agreed Chris Giles in the FT, and obviously much depends on the outcome of the election. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has said repeatedly that he wants a governor “in tune” with his views. An intriguing development is the return to the fray of Sir Paul Tucker – the former deputy governor who lost out to Mark Carney in 2012, said Russell Lynch in The Sunday Telegraph. Tucker reportedly only found out at the last minute that the chancellor, George Osborne, had ditched him. As such, he’s the perfect “revenge candidate” for Boris Johnson. Appointing him “would help the PM flick a V-sign at an old political enemy”. We should never “underestimate the importance of the trivial in the high affairs of state”.