George Osborne brushed convention aside yesterday by installing a foreigner, Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, to run the Bank of England with a mission to shake up Britain’s central bank as it assumes sweeping new powers.
The City hailed the appointment as a breath of fresh air and an invigorating sign of the government’s desire to show that the UK was “open for business” from abroad.
The chancellor’s surprise coup came after months of courting Mr Carney in a bid to attract an outsider to overhaul the BoE. Mr Carney will succeed Sir Mervyn King when his term ends in July, becoming the first foreigner to head Britain’s central bank in its 318-year history.