Valuing Alex

It’s just over a month since Alex was terminated and the word is slowly spreading. Sympathetic articles in Private Eye, The Oldie and The Australian Financial Review have helped propagate the news and most people have now woken up to the reality that Alex is not on a protracted Easter break.

Some readers have formed the mistaken impression that we have retired. But that has only happened in the sense that the replicants in Blade Runner were “retired” by Harrison Ford with extreme prejudice. No, Alex is not being put out to grass and will be back in some form, we promise.

We are still receiving dozens of commiseratory emails a week and not just from financial professionals: we’ve even had a couple from priests, telling us how much they miss Alex (clearly they were doing their due diligence on the workings of Mammon).

People have also been buying prints of their favourite cartoons from our website as mementos (Alex isn’t going anywhere, but feel free to do the same). It’s intriguing to discover the odd and obscure jokes that our fans have liked. We’re publishing a selection of them on Mondays on our website.

Nice as it is to know how much our cartoon meant to people, Alex, being a banker, would want to know exactly how much he was worth in hard monetary terms. This set us to pondering on how to value a commodity like Alex. We’ve been talking to a couple of IP lawyers and there’s no obvious formula, but here’s a way of doing a rough valuation.

Among many fans informing us that they have cancelled their Telegraph subscriptions, one person told us how he phoned the Telegraph and explained that he was cancelling his subscription because of their decision to drop Alex. The salesperson responded by reducing the annual sub from £350 to £119. This values Alex’s contribution to the whole Telegraph package at £231 (or about 77%), which says a lot about the rest of the content of the newspaper (Matt being the honourable exception, of course).

Another long-term fan (a member of the House of Lords no less) copied us in on a letter she wrote to the Telegraph saying how much she missed Alex. The letter was neither published not acknowledged. In it the Baroness claimed that Alex is worth his weight in gold. We decided to do a quick calculation. Assuming that Alex (after a lifetime of City lunches) weighs in at about 14 stone, this makes 3,136 ounces. With gold at its current giddy heights of £2,543 per ounce, that would value him at £7,974,848 (*).

So, there you have it, Alex is worth somewhere between £231 and £7,974,848. Any offers (towards the high end) will be considered.

Keep the emails coming. Replying to them is keeping us busy in this (temporary) slack period while we are talking to several media outlets about bringing Alex back in some form. And sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear when we have some news.

(*) Reader David Crossland, who admits to being retired, has emailed to point out that gold is measured in the heavier troy ounces, rather than avoirdupois, and thus Alex's total weight would be 2,858 ounces, which with the recent reduction in the gold price, would make his total value a more modest £6,953,514. We salute our learned correspondent's pedantry..

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ALEXIT - THE FEEDBACK

Many, many thanks to all of you, who have taken the trouble to write in to us about the end of Alex. We have received literally hundreds of emails, WhatsApps and LinkedIn messages from Alex readers all over the world (plus a few commiserating pats on the back and glasses of vino down at the watering hole). We’re trying to reply to everyone individually, but if we’ve missed any of you out, apologies and we’d like to say we’re grateful to you. It makes a big difference, at this slightly low moment in our careers, to read your kind words and to feel our work has been appreciated and will be missed.

Many of you have said how “bereft” you feel that your mornings have an Alex-shaped gap in them, where he used to accompany your breakfast routine, especially when the rest of the financial news is so grim. For many of you it seems Alex has been an ever-present throughout your careers - some even describe him (we hope, tongue in cheek) as a guiding light, a soulmate or even a role model. This may be hyperbole but we’re both of us susceptible to flattery and shallow enough to love it. One person described Alex’s passing as a “Lady Diana” moment for the City. A bit over the top possibly? But he also said that his ex-boss had tears in his eyes when he heard the news. Making bankers cry? Now that is an achievement..

Some of you have commented that the cartoon captured the "zeitgeist of the City”. We are of the same age as Alex so the idea of him as a generational symbol cheers us up. The Big Bang Boomers, maybe (or the BBBs to coin an acronym)? Lots of people have quoted their favourite jokes (often the rude ones) and told us how phrases from the cartoon have passed into City vernacular. One kind person compared us to Samuel Pepys (though Pepys only kept his diary for nine years). We should let you know that this is all amazingly gratifying for us, especially given that normally writing cartoons doesn’t get much feedback and we sometimes feel like we’re dropping stones down a well and not necessarily even hearing a ‘plop’. So when someone writes to say they liked a joke that we liked, but which never seemed to make a splash at the time, it’s great.

One person described Alex as “the last bastion of truth” - because we are the only people who dare to stick it to the man (we think he means the man in compliance and - invariably - the woman in HR). Another commented “You’ve made so many people laugh almost every day which is surely good for mental health, especially of those in the financial sector.” Nice to know we’re doing our bit for corporate wellness.

One banker, now in his 40s and working on Wall Street, claims that reading Alex in his undergraduate days taught him more about his future career than the finance degree he was studying for. Another tells us that he landed his first job in the City thanks to Alex. When asked why he wanted to work for the bank he was interviewing for, he replied that he wanted to be like his idol Alex and make lots of money. He got the job (we’re not sure whether this stratagem would work in a modern HR-led job interview). He is now retired from a successful career and living in New Zealand. Stories like this might make us feel failures as satirists (as the idea was to put people off mercenary City values) but we’re taking any compliments we can get at the moment.

Additionally many people who have reached out to us (as we must now say) tell us that Alex was the only thing they read the Telegraph for and that they have now cancelled their subscriptions in protest. Whether enough of them have done so to cause the paper to lose more in subs that it saved in our salary is not known. Anyway, Matt is still in there and we’d miss seeing his great work, so we’ll keep reading ourselves. We don’t bear a grudge against The DT. We actually feel we’ve been lucky to have kept the gig going for so long.

And it’s been genuinely touching to see how a character as disreputable as Alex has somehow managed to engender such widespread affection.

Due to the timing of Alex’s departure - right at the beginning of the school holidays - some regular readers may be still unaware what has happened and are assuming that we are just taking our standard two-week spring break. There may be a second wave of outrage when Alex fails to return after Easter.

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