George Osborne, the former chancellor, has emerged as a shock contender to become the next chairman of HSBC Holdings, one of the world’s top banking jobs.

Sky News can exclusively reveal that Mr Osborne, who was chancellor from 2010 until 2016, was approached during the summer about becoming the successor to Sir Mark Tucker.

This weekend, City sources said that Mr Osborne was one of three remaining candidates in the frame to take on the chairmanship of the London-headquartered lender.

Naguib Kheraj, the City veteran who was previously finance director of Barclays and deputy chairman of Standard Chartered, is also in contention.

The other candidate is said to be Kevin Sneader, the former McKinsey boss who now works for Goldman Sachs in Asia.

It was unclear this weekend whether other names remained in contention for the job, or whether the board regarded any as the frontrunner at this stage.

Mr Osborne’s inclusion on the shortlist is a major surprise, given his lack of public company chairmanship experience.

With a market capitalisation of almost £190bn, HSBC is the second-largest FTSE-100 company, after drugs giant AstraZeneca.

The bank has been looking for a replacement for Sir Mark for nearly a year, but has run what external critics have labelled a chaotic succession process.

Sir Mark, who has returned to the helm of insurer AIA as its non-executive chairman, stepped down at the end of September, but remains an adviser to the board.

Brendan Nelson, the former KPMG vice-chairman, became interim chair of HSBC last month and will remain in place until a permanent successor is found.

If he got the job, Mr Osborne would be a radical choice for one of Britain’s biggest corporate jobs.

Since stepping down as an MP, he has assumed a varied professional life, becoming editor of the London Evening Standard for three years, a post he left in 2020.

Since then, he has become a partner at Robey Warshaw, the merger advisory firm recently acquired by Evercore, where he remains in place.

If he were to become HSBC chairman, he would be obliged to give up that role.

Mr Osborne also chairs the British Museum, is an adviser to the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and is chairman of Lingotto Investment Management, which is controlled by Italy’s billionaire Agnelli business dynasty.

During his chancellorship, Mr Osborne and then prime minister David Cameron fostered closer links with Beijing in a bid to boost trade ties between the two countries.

“Of course, there will be ups and downs in the road ahead, but by sticking together we can make this a golden era for the UK-China relationship for many years to come,” he said in a speech in Shanghai in 2015.

Mr Osborne was also reported to have intervened on HSBC’s behalf as it sought to avoid prosecution in the US in 2012 on money laundering charges.

The much cooler current relationship between the UK – and many of its allies – and China will be the most significant geopolitical context faced by Sir Mark’s successor as HSBC chairman.

While there is little doubt about his intellectual bandwidth for the role, it would be rare for such a plum corporate job to go to someone with such a spartan public company boardroom pedigree.

His lack of direct banking experience would also be expected to come under close scrutiny from regulators.

HSBC’s shares have soared over the last year, rising by more than 50%, despite the headwinds posed by President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs regime.

When he was appointed, Mr Tucker became the first outsider to take the post in the bank’s 152-year history – and which has a big presence on the high street thanks to its acquisition of the Midland Bank in 1992.

He oversaw a rapid change of leadership, appointing bank veteran John Flint to replace Stuart Gulliver as chief executive.

The transition did not work out, however, with Mr Tucker deciding to sack Mr Flint after just 18 months.

He was replaced on an interim basis by Noel Quinn in the summer of 2018, with that change becoming permanent in April 2020.

Mr Quinn spent a further four years in the post before deciding to step down, and in July 2024 he was succeeded by Georges Elhedery, a long-serving executive in HSBC’s markets unit and more recently the bank’s chief financial officer.

The new chief’s first big move in the top job was to unveil a sweeping reorganisation of HSBC that sees it reshaped into eastern markets and western markets businesses.

He also decided to merge its commercial and investment banking operations into a single division.

The restructuring, which Mr Elhedery said would “result in a simpler, more dynamic, and agile organisation” has drawn a mixed reaction from analysts, although it has not interrupted a strong run for the stock.

During Sir Mark’s tenure, HSBC continued to exit non-core markets, selling operations in countries such as Canada and France as it sharpened its focus on its Asian operations.

HSBC has been contacted for comment, while Mr Osborne could not be reached for comment.

In late September, HSBC said in a statement: “The process to select the permanent HSBC Group Chair, led by Ann Godbehere, Senior Independent Director, is ongoing.

“The company will provide further updates on this succession process in due course.”

“I felt scared and I felt alone and I felt entirely limited at various points in my life”, actor Jonathan Bailey says of growing up gay in school.

While promoting Wicked: For Good, the actor donated one of his interview slots to talk about the charity he is a patron of: Just Like Us, which works with LGBT+ youth in schools.

“That’s something that I would have really benefited from when I was young,” he said, talking exclusively to Sky News about his charitable work.

In surveys of thousands of UK pupils, Just Like Us found that LGBT participants aged 11 to 18 were twice as likely to suffer anxiety, depression and to be bullied, and that only half felt safe at school on a daily basis.

“I experienced all of that,” he said. “It became clear quite early on that something that was very specific and clear to me about who I was, it wasn’t safe and it wasn’t celebrated.”

Whether as Lord Anthony in Bridgerton, being crowned sexiest man alive and as the Winkie Prince Fiyero in Wicked: For Good, Bailey has broken through an outdated stereotype.

Historically, it was considered a career risk to be out – a heterosexual romantic lead’s career was at risk if his sexuality was public.

For the Winkie prince actor, education can play a role in defying limitations.

“This is beyond sexuality,” he said, “it’s race, it’s class, it is where you’re from, we are all given limiting narratives that we have to break free of.

“I thought not only was I not going to be able to play these sorts of parts because of my sexuality, but that I wouldn’t be able to do Shakespeare because I didn’t go to drama school.

“They’re the sort of stories that we need to be reminded of is that actually standing up and being safe enough to be able to say who you really are, and to be vulnerable at that age… these formative years, is inspiring to everyone in the classroom.”

But classrooms in the UK are facing tightening budgets due to “spiralling costs” that threaten to outstrip the growth in school funding.

Citing budget and time pressures on teachers, Just Like Us has made its talks free in schools. Does the actor think the government should be doing more?

He said: “I’m a very proud brother of an incredible teacher who works in the state system, and I know how much she cares about her school, her pupils.

“The resources are being crunched, and the problem is that it will be the arts and it will be really important conversations that Just Like Us bring into the schools and these… things that are going to go, and that’s just really sad.

“But I’m not the person to come up with solutions other than I can do my bit.”

Bailey, Cynthia Erivo and Bowen Yang are among Wicked’s LGBT cast, and in Wicked: For Good, openly gay actor Colman Domingo joins them as the voice of the Cowardly Lion.

But not everyone is encouraging the onscreen representation: A “warning” by conservative group One Million Moms said that the Jon M Chu-directed films are “normalising the LGBTQ lifestyle” to children and takes aim at the cast.

The alert urges people to boycott the sequel “even if you have seen Wicked: Part One”.

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When asked about the pushback, Bailey is resolute: “I don’t even acknowledge… the thing that’s important to me is how do I chat to little Johnny in all this.

“I’m thrilled to be living in a time where I can play the Winkie Prince and where Just Like Us is doing the extraordinary work that they’re doing.”

Donald Trump has said he will sue the BBC for between $1bn and $5bn over the editing of his speech on Panorama.

The US president confirmed he would be taking legal action against the broadcaster while on Air Force One overnight on Saturday.

“We’ll sue them. We’ll sue them for anywhere between a billion (£792m) and five billion dollars (£3.79bn), probably sometime next week,” he told reporters.

“We have to do it, they’ve even admitted that they cheated. Not that they couldn’t have not done that. They cheated. They changed the words coming out of my mouth.”

Mr Trump then told reporters he would discuss the matter with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer over the weekend, and claimed “the people of the UK are very angry about what happened… because it shows the BBC is fake news”.

The Daily Telegraph reported earlier this month that an internal memo raised concerns about the BBC’s editing of a speech made by Mr Trump on 6 January 2021, just before a mob rioted at the US Capitol building, on the news programme.

The concerns regard clips spliced together from sections of the president’s speech to make it appear he told supporters he was going to walk to the US Capitol with them to “fight like hell” in the documentary Trump: A Second Chance?, which was broadcast by the BBC the week before last year’s US election.

Following a backlash, both BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News chief executive Deborah Turness resigned from their roles.

‘No basis for defamation claim’

On Thursday, the broadcaster officially apologised to the president and added that it was an “error of judgement” and the programme will “not be broadcast again in this form on any BBC platforms”.

A spokesperson said that “the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited,” but they also added that “we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim”.

Earlier this week, Mr Trump’s lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1bn unless it apologised, retracted the clip, and compensated him.

Legal challenges

But legal experts have said that Mr Trump would face challenges taking the case to court in the UK or the US.

The deadline to bring the case to UK courts, where defamation damages rarely exceed £100,000 ($132,000), has already expired because the documentary aired in October 2024, which is more than one year.

Also because the documentary was not shown in the US, it would be hard to show that Americans thought less of the president because of a programme they could not watch.

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Newsnight allegations

The BBC has said it was looking into fresh allegations, published in The Telegraph, that its Newsnight show also selectively edited footage of the same speech in a report broadcast in June 2022.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards. This matter has been brought to our attention and we are now looking into it.”