City Spy: Hester’s not passive as he ponders future tense

What next for Stephen Hester after Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne decided he was no longer the right man to run Royal Bank of Scotland?

Hester has to work until the end of September when he will leave with a cheque for £1.6 million, equivalent to one year’s pay and perks.

He will eventually get between £3 million and £4 million in long-term share bonuses. Hester says his immediate plan is a decent holiday saying that he has “worked for 33 years pretty much without a break”. He will use that time to decide what to do next but admits that, at the age of 52, “obviously I will do something and I am biased towards another executive role”.

Asked if he might fancy chairing a big company he replies: “I think I am a bit too young to go passive just yet.”

Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton will be 60 in October. Hester also has one firm rule about who he will work for: “I think you can safely assume it won’t be a government-controlled company.”

Is BSkyB is losing its touch? As BT’s new pay-TV sports channels began broadcasting with great fanfare last week City Spy wondered what happened to Project Purple, the crack squad of Sky staff who, according to one source, are “dedicated to strangling BT Sport at birth”.

Maybe it’s meant to be a long, slow demise — like putting a frog in warm water and turning up the heat. That would make broadcasting types at BT’s new sports facility on the fringes of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park turn purple. Or, maybe if the telecoms giant makes a go of it having already signed up 500,000 customers, it will be Sky chiefs who go puce.

* Glaswegian Ralph Topping, William Hill’s chief executive, has been travelling non-stop in “various cigar tubes”, as the bookie expands into the US, Australia, Italy and Spain. But does his strong accent lead to misunderstandings? Not abroad, he says, but closer to home. “All I need do is go into the chairman [Gareth Davis] and say something. He’s too polite to say ‘What?’, and just agrees. I get away with murder.”

* What can be a tougher job than protecting Centrica’s bosses from accusations of profiteering after last week’s latest financial results? How about joining an industry rife with accusations about blood diamonds? Julian Mears, Centrica’s respected head of group media relations, has been poached for the newly created position of “global head of external comms” at De Beers.