Pennant-Rea joined the Bank of England in 1973 and remained until 1977, when he left to work for The Economist magazine.[4] He was the magazine's editor from 1986 until 1993.[6] Between 1993 and 1995, he again joined the Bank of England as Deputy Governor of the bank, under the governorship of Edward George;[4] he resigned following reports of an extramarital affair with Mary Ellen Synon, whom he had met at Trinity College, Dublin.[7]
In 1994 he became a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.
In 1995 he became a director of a Canadian mining company, Sherritt International.[8] In March 1996, he was banned from the USA (along with his wife at the time and under-age children) because of Sherritt's commercial interests in Cuba, under the terms of the USA's Helms-Burton Act.
Pennant-Rea was chairman of The Stationery Office following its privatisation in 1996.[9] He was a British American Tobacco director from 1998 to 2007.[10] He was also Chairman of Henderson Group,[11][12] and a non-executive director of several companies such as Go-Ahead Group, a transport company, First Quantum Minerals and Gold Fields,[13] both mining companies.
In July 2009, Pennant-Rea was appointed non-executive chairman of The Economist Group, having served as a non-executive director since August 2006. In July 2018, after nine years, he was succeeded by Paul Deighton. He was chairman at Royal London,[14] and Chairman of PGI , an agriculture company. He was a National Independent director of Times Newspapers.[15] Since retiring from Royal London in 2019, Pennant-Rea has been an angel investor and board member of start-ups related to greenhouse gases reduction such as Cloud-Cycle .[16]
In the non-profit sector, Pennant-Rea is a trustee of the Marjorie Deane Foundation. He was a trustee of Speakers Trust,[17] the UK's leading public-speaking training charity and Chairman of the Shakespeare Schools Festival. Pennant-Rea has written several books about economics and a novel, Gold Foil.[18]
