LONDON BRIEFING:Former HBOS chief Andy Hornby has found another job just months after quitting Alliance Boots

ANDY HORNBY may not have been much good at banking but the former Halifax Bank of Scotland chief executive is certainly in possession of a rare talent for landing lucrative jobs.

Two years ago, just months after quitting HBOS in disgrace, Hornby (44) secured a plum £1 million-a-year (€1.14 million) position as chief executive of private equity-owned health and beauty group Alliance Boots. It was a rapid corporate rehabilitation for someone who had been at the forefront of the banking sector’s worst excesses.

Hornby quit Alliance Boots unexpectedly just a few months ago, little more than 18 months into his new career. At the time, it seemed rather a sad case, despite the fact that sympathy for bankers is in short supply these days.

Hornby appeared to be suffering a corporate version of post-traumatic stress disorder: he had taken on a demanding job too soon and needed a break, Alliance Boots said as it let him go without a pay-off, in recognition of the fact that it was he who had chosen to resign.

When the Alliance Boots annual report was published some time later, however, it emerged that Hornby had in fact been given a payment of £450,000 when he quit to stop him joining a rival healthcare group. In total, his earnings for the year were £2.4 million, including a bonus of £750,000 and pension top-up of more than £330,000.

Now, just a few months after quitting the health and beauty business, Hornby has returned to the fray once again, landing another leading role, this time as chief executive of the Coral bookmaking chain. The jobs are getting progressively smaller but Coral, part of the Gala Coral Group, is still Britain’s third-largest bookies chain, with some 1,670 shops, plus an online and phone gambling operation.

Hornby may not have been first choice for Coral, however, as its former chief executive, Nick Rust, defected to Ladbrokes last year and the post has been vacant for a full 12 months.

There is a retail connection as, prior to becoming a banker, Hornby did a four-year stint at Asda, while Gala Coral chairman Robert Templeman is a former chief executive of Debenhams and Gala Coral chief executive Carl Leaver is an ex-Marks Spencer man.

They appear thrilled to have secured the former banker’s services and it is perhaps fitting that someone with experience of so-called casino banking should now be working for a company that owns real casinos.

There will be some familiarity, too, with Gala Coral’s financial position in 2010: after negotiations that dragged on for almost 12 months, the debt-laden company finally completed a £2.5 billion restructuring of its debt.

There is talk that Hornby is interested in leading a management buyout of the bookmaking business from Gala Coral in due course, although this was being played down by the company.

It is rare for a banker to be given a second chance but Hornby is now on this third. There is unlikely to be a fourth, so we will have to wait and see if his talent for landing jobs is matched with his skill at keeping them.

AS HORNBYembarks on his new career, another comeback kid hits the exit – again. Tom Alexander, who made his reputation at Virgin Mobile, has unexpectedly quit as chief executive of Everything Everywhere, the Orange/T-Mobile phone operator.

His departure from Britain’s largest mobile phone company (as measured by customer numbers) comes little more than a year after it was created via the merger of the UK operations of France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom.

Alexander (50) founded Virgin Mobile in 1998 and collected more than £20 million when the business was floated in 2004. He left when it was sold to NTL two years later but, despite a penchant for sportscar racing (and the money to pursue such a ruinously expensive hobby), he was wooed back into the industry last year to run Everything Everywhere.

The business has its problems, however, and not just its ridiculous name. Despite its market-leading customer base of almost 28 million, it has been underperforming rivals Vodafone and O2 and integration is behind schedule.

Both sides denied any ill-feeling in the parting of the ways but no real explanation for Alexander’s departure was given, other than that it was for personal reasons.

There was no word on any pay-off either. After retiring from Virgin, Alexander clearly missed the challenge of running a business, despite his millions and the adrenaline of the race-track.

But comebacks aren’t always easy, as Hornby could have told him.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London