Leader: Ex-bank chief's horse comes in with job at bookies

TOUGH times? We're all in this together? Up to a point, m'lud. It seems only yesterday that Tommy Sheridan was jailed for three years on five counts of perjury.

But yesterday he stepped out to freedom and began a three-day leave from jail to help him acclimatise to life on the outside. It is the first in a series of such breaks, yet it comes amid claims that he was being "singled out and victimised" as he had been initially granted seven days' release.

Tough times can hardly be said to have befallen Derek Simpson, the former joint leader of Unite, Britain's biggest trade union. He was found to be the recipient of a golden handshake worth more than 500,000, a payment understood to include a 361,000 severance payment. Isn't this just the sort of "fat cattery" against which union chiefs rail? His successor Len McCluskey has not rushed forward with fraternal congratulations and has criticised the payment.

But the biggest prize of all for bucking the tough times we are in must surely go to Andy Hornby, the hapless ex-chief executive of banking giant HBOS when it was felled by the financial crisis and slumped into the arms of Lloyds Banking Group. Shares in the bank collapsed and not even a public apology could cool the rage of thousands of bank staff and shareholders. But Hornby soon walked into the top job at high street retail giant Boots - only to quit suddenly because of stress.

Now he has landed a new chief executive posting: this time at bookmaker chain Coral. It is a post that many former investors at HBOS might regard as wholly appropriate, given their rage at what they felt was the way he gambled away the bank. They are unlikely to be placing bets with Coral any time soon. But Mr Hornby clearly has a winning streak, of sorts.