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.