On the face of it, the departure of Nick Prettejohn as Prudential’s UK chief appears to be fairly straightforward: he lost out to Tidjane Thiam for the post of the Pru’s chief executive, so he is leaving.

This is a fairly glib explanation, however, for a departure that does not appear to be in any way rancorous and that actually raises more questions than answers.

The first is what Mr Prettejohn, who has done a first-class job in restructuring the Pru’s hitherto moribund UK operations, does next. It seems Mr Prettejohn, a member of the Royal Opera House board, is so in love with his librettos that he is reluctant to leave London. This rules out the hope that he might be lured to Edinburgh to succeed Sir Sandy Crombie at Standard Life.

But it does mean he will be available for any number of other jobs once he has left the Pru in September, a tantalising prospect that is sure to have City headhunters smacking their lips in anticipation. Why? Because the corporate gene pool no longer flows as deeply as it once did.

News this week that Sir Win Bischoff is in the frame to become the new chairman of Lloyds Banking Group left some observers underwhelmed. But his presence on the shortlist highlights the point that, in financial services, he is one of only a handful of people at chairman or chief executive level who have a clean history and are untainted by the crisis that began in August 2007. Mr Prettejohn would be another, and it is certainly not fanciful to think that he might be in line for a top banking job when one comes up, for example as a successor to Lloyds chief executive Eric Daniels. Alternatively, away from financial services, he could easily be tempted by a FTSE 100 chairmanship. His previous rescue mission, at Lloyd’s of London, highlighted his qualities.

Mr Prettejohn, it is also worth recalling, is extremely well plugged into Conservative circles. A former president of the Oxford Union, his contemporaries included William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary who, in the infamous interview in which he claimed to have consumed 14 pints of beer in a day, also credited the future insurance executive with some ferocious pre-debate drinking.

In the event of a Conservative election victory next year, he would be an intriguing and well-placed candidate to take on one of those roles — and there seem to be more of them these days — where the worlds of politics and business overlap. Advising an incoming Cameron government on improving Britain’s appalling levels of saving, or on the crisis in pension provision created by the current administration, for example, would be an obvious move.

The second question is what becomes of the Pru’s UK arm itself? Despite Mr Prettejohn’s efforts, it has long been apparent that the Pru sees its long-term future as far more of an international operator, with Asia and the US providing the lion’s share of its growth in the coming years.

Before changing his mind, the Pru’s outgoing chief, Mark Tucker, considered selling it two years ago, while Mr Thiam is bound to take a look at the business as a whole. In the meantime, the new UK supremo, the youthful Rob Devey, is an operations and process expert. This suggests that, for the Pru’s UK staff, the long march to greater efficiency begun under Mr Prettejohn is only set to continue.

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