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Green appointed Trade Minister

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

David Cameron has chosen the current chairman of HSBC as Britain’s new trade minister. The unpaid role carries a seat in the House of Lords and a heavy responsibility – driving forward UK exports and British businesses in a period of uncertainty and recession.

The appointment is a doubly satisfying one for the coalition government because as well as settling a successful business leader into the trade role, Stephen Green is a ‘good banker’ in media terms, having managed to navigate HSBC through the credit crisis without needing a government bail-out. The City has been watching the appointment with some cynicism as several leading financial figures have turned down the post in the period since the election, but Green’s appointment is likely to prove popular with traders and bankers.

Trade relations key to future

It’s also likely to quiet some of the Tory ranks, who’ve been muttering about the fact that no Tory grandee has been seen as suitable for the role, but the Prime Minister has made it clear that strengthening trade relations with emerging powers like India and China required a complex balance of diplomatic and entrepreneurial skills.

Another area in which Stephen Green’s appointment calms political jitters is that he is likely to work well with those to whom he reports: Business Secretary Vince Cable and Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Big moves in banking signal change of focus

Vince Cable has already commented on Green’s ‘powerful philosophy for ethical business’ which might cause mild consternation in areas of business that are not as proactively ethically focused as the former HSBC’s chairman, himself a lay preacher who has donated a vast amount of his personal wealth to charity and good causes. Green is a stark contrast to the new Barclays CE Bob Diamond, who has caused some friction in the press, if very little in banking circles.

If Green’s appointment papers some cracks, Diamond’s move to the top job marks another fissure between government (where Peter Mandelson, Vince Cable’s predecessor, once described Diamond as ‘the unacceptable face of banking’) and business. The City increasingly views rewarding big hitters who kept their nerve through the banking crisis as a potential contribution to kick-starting the UK’s slow-moving economy, despite the way those rewards are reported in the media.

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