Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Broadbent’s faux pas puts the focus on female candidates to follow Carney

If Ben Broadbent’s Daily Telegraph interview last week was the launch of a bid for the governorship of the Bank of England, then it spectacularly misfired. The deputy governor’s use of ‘-menopausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak — damned by the Guardian as ‘un-abashed misogyny’ even though his awkward metaphor, on closer inspection, was also about loss of male potency — has significantly lengthened the odds on Broadbent succeeding Mark Carney in June next year.

Indeed, even though he has the golden qualification of a decade at Goldman Sachs, I hear he’s no longer the favourite even among the four current deputy governors and their immediate predecessors. Ex-Treasury official Sir Jon Cunliffe has quietly built a big reputation in the City, as has Andrew Bailey of the Financial Conduct Authority. Sir Paul Tucker, an unlucky faller after the financial crisis, still has his admirers, as does Charlotte Hogg, who was briefly a deputy governor before she resigned in a tangle over an undeclared conflict of interest. A Hogg comeback is a long shot, but the elegant Egyptian-born Dame Minouche Shafik, currently at the LSE and having previously served at the IMF, would tick every possible box if she entered the running.

Female candidates will garner all the more attention because Broadbent’s faux pas has brought a spotlight on the BoE’s gender imbalance: none of the current deputies, just two of 12 members of the Court of Directors and one of nine Monetary Policy Committee members are female. Stand by for a rush of whispers as Downing Street (where the new governor will be chosen) tries out names to see how the City and media react. Among them will be Baroness Shriti Vadera, once Gordon Brown’s feared enforcer, said to be doing a good job these days chairing Santander UK; she’d certainly be a match for Labour’s John McDonnell if he ever becomes Chancellor.

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