The wrong man

For the final three years of his 18-year career at Goldman Sachs, Jim O’Neill, the Treasury’s new commercial secretary with responsibility for developing the Northern Powerhouse, served as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the company’s least-regarded and most bothersome unit. While two younger executives ran the business, O’Neill was dispatched to faraway conferences to bore audiences of docile suits with his views on whether Nigeria or Malaysia offered a better investment opportunity. When finally in early 2013 he resigned his sinecure, he was not replaced and his title was mothballed.

Since then, he has been all but marching up and down Whitehall wearing a sandwich board pleading for a government job. He chaired an inquiry into the need for anti-microbial drugs, and then another proposing greater devolution of powers to cities. As a Mancunian who has spent most of his adult life living in Surrey and working in the City, he claims now to want to rebalance Britain’s economy away from London and is working for the Treasury free of charge.

There has been plenty of criticism in recent years of the flow of senior figures from Goldman Sachs into the public sectors of the United States and Europe as well as in Britain. The current Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, and head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, both spent time at Goldman, and the bank’s alumni have spread through the US Treasury like bindweed. Politicians are willing to take the risk of seeming in hock to the banking industry in return for a sharp mind and an even sharper pair of elbows. You know what you’re getting with a Goldman Sachs banker: a tough, no-nonsense, pragmatic deal-maker, even to a fault.