How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the public domain? The three names ‘exclusively’ revealed by Sky News, if they really are the final contenders, ought to be a secret kept between a board committee led by senior independent director Ann Godbehere and the headhunters on the job, named as MWM Consulting. Two of the three – Kevin Sneader from Goldman Sachs and Naguib Kheraj, formerly of Barclays and Standard Chartered – might feature in a round-up of usual suspects. But the third is the former chancellor George Osborne, who has no public-­company chairmanship experience and is, to say the least, a Marmite figure.

Hence we might suspect a judicious leak – HSBC says it won’t comment on ‘speculation’ – to test what investors, corporate customers and mischievous columnists might think. The best precedent, by the way, is century-old: Reginald McKenna, who was Asquith’s chancellor, went on to chair the then world-leading Midland Bank from 1919 to 1943. And let’s not forget Nigel Lawson, reportedly disappointed not to have been offered the chair of NatWest before he found a lesser billet at Barclays.

But what’s to be said for or against Osborne? The public never warmed to him as a politician. Mervyn King, as governor of the Bank of England, expressed a (leaked) view that Osborne and David Cameron were ‘out of their depth’ on economic issues........

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