Back from the grave and ready to party — that’s the London Stock Exchange

Asked what he did in the French Revolution, the Abbé Sieyes explained that he survived it. Against all the odds, this has been the London Stock Exchange’s achievement. It is still there. Its dreary old building looks better as a hole in the ground, but the Exchange has found itself a new perch in Paternoster Square, and remains an independent British entity. You could have bet against it. Not long ago its only choice seemed to be whether to surrender to the Germans or the French: ‘Levez les mains’ or ‘Hande hoch’? Not so long before that it agreed to join up with the Frankfurt exchange, Deutsche Börse, whose Swiss surpremo, Werner Seifert, would come in and run the merged business. This half-baked dish — I labelled it a horse-and-rabbit pie — was too much for the shareholders to swallow. They voted it down, the chief executive lost his job and the chairman did not last much longer.