(Bloomberg) --
Britain's international reputation has been damaged by Brexit and some candidates to be the next Bank of England Governor might be deterred by the turmoil, according to U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond.
Speaking to reporters in Washington Friday, Hammond said the process of finding a successor to Mark Carney is under way, but some potential replacements may not want to be exposed to the current Brexit debate.
The U.K.'s Brexit deadline was this week was pushed back as far as October, giving Hammond more to worry about as he renews the search for a new Governor. The Chancellor said he would have preferred to have begun the process with Britain already out of the EU, and admitted that the political chaos surrounding its departure had damaged the nation's image.
The U.K. has got “a bit of work to do to recover our reputation as cool, calm and collected,” Hammond said.
Carney is due to leave the BOE in January, having twice extended his term to help oversee Britain's divorce from the bloc. The Canadian said Thursday that this week's delay to the Brexit deadline wouldn't affect his plans to step down.
Hammond said in January that he was looking both in the U.K. and abroad to find the next governor, although Bloomberg's latest survey of economists suggests that a homegrown candidate is favorite to succeed Carney.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jessica Shankleman in London at jshankleman@bloomberg.net;David Goodman in London at dgoodman28@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Fergal O'Brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net, Lucy Meakin, Andrew Atkinson
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