The LSE’s skulking assassins are a terrible advert for the City’s global aspirations

The revenge tragedy at the London Stock Exchange whose plot I outlined last month has reached its third act, but the carnage may not be over. Chief executive Xavier Rolet has left the building, rather than staying one more year as the LSE first announced, and declared that he won’t come back under any circumstances. Despite whispers that ‘aspects of his operating style’ sparked this row in the first place, Rolet is due a £13 million golden farewell — which the Daily Mail called ‘obscene’ but his fans see as fair reward for all the value he has delivered.

Chief among those fans is LSE shareholder and hedge-fund princeling Sir Chris Hohn, who agitated for Rolet to stay and LSE chairman Donald Brydon to go. So far Hohn has achieved precisely the opposite. Brydon has agreed to retire, but not until April 2019, when he will be almost 74 and surely (even for a man apparently hewn from Scottish granite) ready to ease back. Hohn still wields a dagger, however, and will aim it between Brydon’s shoulderblades at a shareholders’ meeting later this month. Meanwhile, City punters eager to spot Rolet’s successor are putting bets on ex-JPMorgan banker Blythe Masters, famed (though not seriously blamed) for developing the credit derivatives that created such global havoc a decade ago.

One way or another, the planets are still misaligned in this saga of clashing egos and skulking assassins that has embarrassed the City at a time when — as the raised eyebrows of Governor Carney communicated last week — it most needs to give a positive presentation of itself to the world. There was another timely reminder of what’s at stake in the engineering multinational Siemens’s decision to float its medical business Healthineers in Frankfurt rather than New York or London, delivering a sideswipe about Brexit in the announcement by Siemens’s director Michael Sen.