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.