In EY’s split, fortune may favour the dull

sketch from 1969, the middle-aged Mr Anchovy, played by Michael Palin, wants to give up what he calls the desperately dull world of chartered accountancy in order to become a lion-tamer. His “vocational guidance counsellor”, aka John Cleese, suggests he consider an interim career path—banking, say—while he works towards lion-taming. “No, no, no, no, no,” Mr Anchovy interrupts. “I don’t want to wait. At nine o’clock tomorrow I want to be in there, taming.”Echoes of Mr Anchovy’s yearnings can be heard in the haste with which , one of the Big Four accounting firms, is considering spinning off its fast-growing consultancy practice from the unfashionable audit side of the business. Not only is it a bold move by the standards of book-keeping firms—to the point, says Michael Izza of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, that ’s three rivals, Deloitte, w and , will be considering their next steps in light of its decision. There is also a hint of Pythonesque farce about it. Such is the excitement that details of a proposed initial public offering () in 2023 were leaked to the which published them on June 20th. They included the size of the potential bonanza for some of the firm’s 13,000 partners—something ’s bean-counters of old would much rather have kept under their bowler hats.