Any other business: Third time lucky? Hoare Govett is the history of the modern City writ small

Amidst the gunfire generated by Stephen Hester’s bonus — on which I’m glad to say he took my advice and did the decent thing, so like Stephen Wraysford at the end of Birdsong he deserves a few days’ rest — I was intrigued by the week’s other RBS story. Hester is reported to be selling the troubled bank’s corporate stockbroking arm, Hoare Govett, to Jefferies, a US securities house. This will be the third change of ownership in 30 years for a firm whose name is so redolent of the pre-Big Bang era that many of us had forgotten it still operates at all, albeit from the death ship which is RBS’s investment banking division. Its history is, in effect, the history of the modern City writ small.

In the post-war decades, Hoare & Co (before its 1970 merger with Govett) was the fiefdom of Kit Hoare — a City gent from the school they knocked down to build the old school, as it were.