It has been a hard year for the Edinburgh investment house. First it had to absorb a difficult merger with Hill Samuel - many of whose fund managers preferred to Find new jobs rather than leave London for bonny Scotland.
It lost its one real star manager, Albert Morillo, head of European equities, who jumped ship to BlackRock prompting several clients to follow.
Then Dudley Fired his head of UK equities, Mike Corless, in the process openly criticizing him for poor performance.
But more crucially for Dudley, more headlines loomed when he undiplomatically suggested that Scottish Widows' parent, Lloyds TSB, which paid more than £7 billion ($11 billion) for the insurer, was not fully committed to fund management and said that the business should be spun off.
"They [Lloyds] are not 100% persuaded that asset management is a core business," he said. "If they are not going to make the investment to build the global business it would be logical to package Scottish Widows and sell it off."
Having put one foot in it, Dudley decided to plant the other one too. "We are like a one-year-old racehorse who shows great potential but they are not sure yet and we haven't got the stable's commitment to train it and turn it into a truly champion two- and three-year-old," he whinnied.