05/05/2025

Farewell, Alex: conceited, boomer (cartoon) banker..

After 38 years, the comic strip is bowing out. Both sharply satirical and acutely anthropological, it got right inside the pinstriped world of high finance.

In October 1986, then-UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher launched her “Big Bang” deregulation of the British economy. This propelled London, and the world, into a new era of financial sophistication – one in which traders, bankers and brokers were the new masters of the universe.

As money began to slosh through the City of London, a new social category emerged from the wash: the yuppie. Conceited, materialistic and hedonistic, this breed was ripe for satire. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the City’s denizens had their own caricaturists and chroniclers: Russell Taylor and Charles Peattie, the writer and illustrator of the Alex cartoon.

The four-panel strip first appeared in a British newspaper, The London Daily News, in February 1987, and made its debut in The Australian Financial Review that October. Its eponymous protagonist – Alex Masterley – may be British and fictional, but he has been one of this newspaper’s most enduring features. For 38 years, he has appeared day in, day out, year in, year out.

He has married, had kids, had affairs, been fired and rehired, run for parliament, endured the GFC, Brexit and COVID, and recently launched his own banking boutique. The coterie of City characters in his milieu has multiplied. But now, the time has come for a somewhat reluctant Taylor and Peattie to hang up their creation’s pinstripe suit and send him off to the golf course.

The cartoon’s British home since 1992, The Daily Telegraph, has called time on Alex. As newspapers go predominantly digital, a four-panel strip is harder to accommodate. So the Financial Review hosted Alex’s final daily instalment on Friday, May 2, as our protagonist left the simulation.

“Actually, it’s quite a compliment to get fired. In the banking world, it proves you’re highly enough paid to be worth firing, to save that much money,” Taylor says when I catch up with him and Peattie. We’re at the George & Vulture, a classic old City boozer and chophouse, where Alex would have had many a liquid lunch – all on expenses, of course.

“We’ve done so many insensitive jokes about bankers getting fired. I actually looked it up on the Alex website, there are 185 jokes we’ve done about redundancy. So we really have invited this upon ourselves.”

The pair are in their mid-60s, so Alex has been the anchor of their entire careers. It’s a vocation they have taken very seriously: Peattie visited restaurants and offices to get the backgrounds to his illustrations just right, while Taylor assiduously cultivated City contacts to get ideas for jokes and storylines that rang true. They’ve always wanted to make people laugh, but the barbs of prickly satire have been mixed with more affectionate jibes, and a broader, almost anthropological endeavour.

“For a long time, we’ve basically felt that we are documenting not just the City but also middle-class life – which doesn’t get documented much in this country, apart from in detective stories or something,” says Peattie. “People just commuting, paying school fees, having boring office lives. We’ve felt that we’ve been reflecting that, which literally nobody else has done. That’s been our secret mission.”

Taylor likewise acknowledges that pillorying the bankers is only half the story. “What I’ve liked about it is, no one knows where we’re coming from. Are we attacking the City or defending it? Some people think either. I don’t know, I mean, it just seems funny.”

One of the first Alex cartoons; published March 13, 1987.

Satirising the dotcom bubble, on February 22, 2001.

Almost as soon as the cartoon started in 1987, bankers – the supposed targets of the ridicule – started getting in touch with feedback and ideas. “People who worked in the City were flattered that anybody would do any cartoons about them,” Peattie says. Taylor agrees: “In those days, banking was still considered a boring job.”

Peattie then muses that Alex may have helped make banking respectable, or even popular or glamorous. Taylor again chimes in: “Over the years we’ve met graduate trainees, or signed books in banks, and people have said, ‘I used to read Alex books in my dad’s loo when I was a kid.’,” he recalls. “And I’d say, ‘So why are you wearing a suit and working in a bank? We were trying to put you off!’. And they’d say, ‘No I loved it, it was really interesting.’ We failed to deter anyone from banking.”

Mission not accomplished. So what’s next? Peattie wants to do some books and theatre, and Taylor is considering whether to prolong Alex in the guise of something like a finance blog. They might release more Alex books and will keep their website going.

They’re philosophical about reaching the end of the road. But where our previous lunch a few years ago had a sort of post-COVID energy, this one feels more elegiac.

“I do regret that we won’t be able to go on with it because there is lots of weird stuff that is going to happen in the next few years,” Peattie says. “Whatever the fallout from the Trump presidency is, it will be incredibly disruptive. And there’s the impact of AI as well. And whenever there is change, that’s actually really good for cartoonists.”

Over such a long span, the world they have portrayed has already changed beyond measure: nobody wears a suit; the blokey, laddish culture is gone; bankers are less overtly ostentatious.

There were 20 mentions of cricket over the years, this one was published on July 2, 2009.

Working from home first appeared on April 7, 2022.

And the old City of London – that “Square Mile” where everybody knew everybody, and the Dickens-era pubs were full for lunch and at knock-off time – is losing ground to the Middle East, United States and Asia. “Alex looks like he chronicled that exact generation of people: he started in ’87 just after Big Bang when the City suddenly became a cool place to work. And [now] London looks like it’s finished, everyone is off to Dubai or New York or Amsterdam,” Taylor muses. “So if Alex ends now, he probably chronicled that entire generation – the Boomer generation in the City. It seems, in a way, quite a good time, for Alex to bow out.”