Now is the time to buy stock in George Osborne

Few politicians have a more volatile share price than George Osborne. His career to date has been a tale of highs (the inheritance tax announcement, the 2010 emergency budget) and lows (yacht-gate and the aftermath of the 2012 budget). Westminster’s stockbrokers were waiting for next week’s autumn statement to decide if his stock was on the up again. But the Chancellor has beaten them to it. His success in persuading Mark Carney, the governor of the Canadian Central Bank, to take on the role of Bank of England governor, is a market-moving intervention.

To be sure, few voters will head to the polls in 2015 determined to return to government the man who put a Canadian in charge of the Bank of England. But Carney’s acceptance of the role is a boost to Osborne’s reputation. He has recruited the man regarded by his peers as the most successful central banker in the world.

Carney’s great triumph was to steer the Canadian economy through the financial crash relatively unscathed despite the intensity of its relationship with the United States: if any country had been entitled to say, as Gordon Brown so frequently did, ‘it started in America’, it would have been Canada. It is not irrational to claim that Carney’s -presence in Threadneedle Street offers as much of a boost as any one man can make to Britain’s medium-term economic prospects.

In the short term, this news has reminded the political world of Osborne’s ability to surprise. He has, like the Mounties, got his man. He’s also managed to pull off this coup without news of it leaking out in advance: the first Westminster and the City knew of it was when he announced it to parliament. The secrecy surrounding this decision has gone some way to restoring trust between the coalition parties, which was greatly damaged by all the pre-Budget leaks.