In the boardroom

ITV shareholders did not wait for Sir Crispin Davis to be appointed chairman before saying publicly they didn’t like him. No wonder people are thinking twice before putting themselves forward to head our major companies. Even salaries of £500,000 plus share options have left supply well short of demand in the ‘C-suite’. A large number of companies have been searching for a chairman this summer but the pool of candidates seems noticeably small: the same names are touted for each job and the rejects join the next shortlist as soon as one vacancy is filled.

Davis, former chief executive of publishers Reed Elsevier, was mooted as chairman of J Sainsbury before the headhunters called him about ITV. The Sainsbury chair (won by Logica’s David Tyler) was available because Sir Philip Hampton became chairman of UKFI, the agency that holds taxpayers’ shareholdings in troubled banks — but such is the shortage of acceptable people that Hampton was almost immediately made chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland instead, forcing UKFI to search again.

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Also on the Sainsbury shortlist was John Peace of Experian, but Standard Chartered nabbed him as chairman first. Sir Win Bischoff, the former Citibank chief, thus missed out on Standard — and UKFI — but got the Lloyds chair. Ron Sandler, brought in to run Northern Rock, missed out on Lloyds but added the Pearl chair to his portfolio. And poor Gerry Grimstone, vetoed from chairing the board of the Bank of England, didn’t get UKFI either — but joined its sister agency, the Shareholder Executive.

Chasing chairmanships is like a game of reverse musical chairs: seats are added rather than taken away. The financial crisis has added to demand by creating bodies such as UKFI, while restricting supply by removing from the pool the bosses whose banks required rescue — and pulling into government FTSE chairmen such as Mervyn Davies from Standard Chartered and Paul Myners from Land Securities.