The Goldman Sachs candidate wins, but spare a thought for the popular loser

So now we know. It’s not the popular insider, the All Souls professor or the Whitehall veteran. It’s not an Old Etonian — uniquely, they couldn’t find one for the shortlist. The winner of the Governorship stakes turned out to be the Goldman Sachs candidate, Mark Carney, currently at the Bank of Canada but formerly of the Wall Street investment firm, the ‘giant vampire squid’ whose tentacles get everywhere. And that’s just about the only jibe that anyone has found to aim at him, because his credentials are pretty outstanding.

To call him ‘the best person in the world’ for the job, as the Chancellor did, is tempting fate — remember when John Browne of BP was repeatedly labelled ‘the world’s best business leader’? The robustness of the Canadian banking system through the financial crisis had at least as much to do with Canada’s relatively restrained national character and stable economy as it had with Carney’s decision-making. But he never put a foot wrong, his reputation stands high, and his appointment to succeed Sir Mervyn King is one that should be welcomed without reservation. Like Archbishop Welby, Carney represents a new beginning in which an awful lot of baggage will be left behind.

But in that context spare a thought for the popular insider, Paul Tucker, the deputy governor whom most of the media expected to take the crown — until the moment the Chancellor spoke Carney’s name. One toxic phone call with Bob Diamond and an unhappy half-hour in front of the Treasury select committee put paid to 30 years of preparation for the role which the City and the central banking world believed would one day be Tucker’s. It’s a crushing disappointment; I hope an interesting job beckons in Basel or Washington — or even Ottawa.

Pig in a poke?

‘Leading through the perfect storm of technological and business change’ was the prescient title of a speech given in London recently by Mike Lynch, founder of Auto-nomy, the Cambridge-based software company that has run into a hurricane of a row with its US owner Hewlett-Packard.