They don’t lunch ’em like they used to. That’s the conclusion Russell Taylor has come to after chronicling the City of London for over three decades in The Telegraph’s cartoon-strip Alex. The pinstripes have come and gone. Markets have crashed and rebounded. Bonuses have swelled agreeably with inflation. But, Taylor says, it’s the expense-account blowouts – or, rather, their demise – that are the true bellwether of change in the world’s foremost financial centre.
“After a couple of glasses of wine, people would get indiscreet, and tell me all sorts of stories,” he tells me. “But these days everything is recorded by compliance. People are terrified. Traditionally, I would go out to lunch, come back with notes scribbled in indecipherable handwriting after a couple of bottles of wine, and write some jokes.”
Put like that, it’s easy to see how Taylor and his creative partner Charles Peattie (who draws the four-panel comic strip) have kept Alex going. From this week, an exhibition at the Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s celebrates 30 years of the cartoon in The Telegraph’s Business pages.
Alex is an unlikely mascot for the City. The Yuppie that never grew up, everyone in his world is crooked, dense or both, while their language would give HR the heebie-jeebies – and yet there’s a puppyish lovability to the character’s trenchant, unrepentant amorality. In fact, he’s become an inadvertent advert for City life.
“One of my City contacts,” Taylor recalls, “told me Alex was his moral compass! And sometimes we’ll meet graduate trainees who are named after him. They’ll tell me they been reading Alex since they were a kid. I’ll say: ‘So why are you here?’”
