First ‘Grexit’, then ‘Brexit’, then ‘Megxit’, now ‘Alexit’.

Being made redundant is an occupational hazard for bankers and, in some ways it is a badge of honour to have been fired several times in one’s career. After all it shows that you are highly paid and that getting rid of you is going to save your employer a significant amount of money. In the current climate of cutbacks, the presently ownerless Daily Telegraph has decided not to renew the contract for the Alex cartoon. Well, we can’t really complain. Not after all the insensitive jokes we’ve done over the years about bankers getting canned.

Having to talk about one’s departure under these circumstances is hard, unless one spouts the usual insincere company line about everyone mutually feeling it was time to move on, which nobody believes and we’re not going to say either. So no explanations.

We hope you didn’t see it coming and we hope you’ll miss Alex. We decided to end his tenure with a kind of ‘Irish Goodbye’ to our readers, slipping off quietly, not publicising our departure or doing a big build up to it in advance (The Telegraph is taking the same approach) because we had an idea for a funny sequence as our last story, and it was going to work better if it had the surprise of a sudden ending. We hope you enjoyed it. If you missed the recent strips you can see them here

To all our readers, including our extensive online readership who have been looking at the strip on Twitter (X), on this website, on Linked In and on the Alex app, we’d like to thank you for staying with us, for your encouragement and all the ideas you keep giving us for jokes (on purpose or inadvertently). The strip couldn’t have existed without you and your feedback, and we’ve enjoyed meeting you over the years at lunches, over drinks and at the Alex stage shows, book signings etc. We’ll miss all that.

It's been more than thirty-eight years of doing this and we realise that we really have been very fortunate in this increasingly homogenised, corporatised, globalised world to have had a platform to create non-standard, sometimes risqué humour with a properly British sensibility, and to have been able to express our point of view and our outlook without (too much) interference or censorship. We hope others will come up behind us and be afforded the same opportunity. We wish them good luck.

Though Alex will no longer be appearing in the pages of a national newspaper in the foreseeable future, he is definitely not retiring (or not for long anyway). There are still stories in our vaults and jokes we are halfway though crafting. And as long as the financial world keeps messing up, plenty of subject matter to write about too. In the meantime, some of our unpublished and rejected ideas may appear here on this page, now that we are free from the editorial veto.

So if you haven’t already done it, please sign up to our mailing list so we can keep you updated about future plans.

And if you want to get in contact, please email us on [email protected].

And keep checking the main website page where we will be posting classic Alex jokes or marking anniversaries.

Our books are mostly still in print and can be bought from us here. We have plans to publish more collections and possibly to reprint the old ones.

You can look through the archives for free here and browse by date and year (like which cartoon ran on whose birthday). Also you might like to order a signed reproduction (£70-00) or an original artwork (£450-00 from Chris Beetles’ gallery.)

Additionally, we are available to produce commissioned cartoons. Excellent gifts for birthdays and retirements. Please email us at [email protected]

And if the new owners of the Telegraph (whoever they turn out to be) want to make us an offer to come back, well, they know how to reach us.

With best wishes and thanks to all of you

Charles and Russell.