First President Obama turned to the 82 year old Paul Volcker for urgently needed advice on banking reform. Now Sir Brian Pitman, the distinguished 78 year old former Lloyds TSB chairman, is going to return to high street banking as chairman of Virgin Money. And this after Stephen Hester, chief executive at Royal Bank of Scotland, admitted the other week that his parents were not short of an opinion or two on the way his industry is going these days.
In the UK, the opposition Conservative party’s most plausible (and popular) spokesman is probably Ken Clarke, the 69 year old former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Certainly, he seems to inspire more confidence than the party’s current shadow chancellor, George Osborne.
Until fairly recently we were often told that youth was everything, and that the world would soon belong to the all-conquering Generation Y. Suddenly there is a bull market in grown-ups. The financial and economic crisis seems to have provoked many into seeking out “monuments of unageing intellect”, as WB Yeats put it.
And all this while the UK employers organisation, the CBI, is still arguing for the right for UK employers to keep a mandatory retirement age of 65 – in other words, the right to sack people at 65 whatever they may still have to offer. I wonder how much this stance really supports their members’ interests?
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Lucy Kellaway, FT columnist and associate editor, offers her solution to your workplace problems in a column in the Financial Times. In the 
