A long farewell to Sir Philip Hampton, Royal Bank of Scotland chairman, whose life in the rarefied higher echelons of British business is now taking him to the troubled pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline.

An accountant by training, Hampton's record has been as "mixed" as that other egg-headed smoothie, Stephen Hester, RBS's former chief executive. Their shared strategy was to smooth over the bank's troubles rather than root out the bad practices that led to the institution receiving around £46 billion in a taxpayer bailout.

Chairmen do not have to be experts in their company's stock-in-trade, but let's hope this bank-to-pharma transfer goes better than the pharma-to-bank move that saw former AstraZeneca chief executive Sir Tom McKillop appointed to chair RBS in 2008 at the heights of the "Fredocracy".

Agenda will not easily forget the RBS AGM of 2008 when, with the bank's ruin already becoming evident, a sheepish McKillop was dismissed by an angry shareholder as a mere "chemist", instantly conjuring a picture of the bungling banker in a white coat, dispensing pile cream from behind the counter at Boots.