NO NEWS is good news, says the City of London Corporation, which yesterday breathed a sigh of relief after the St Paul’s protesters decided to respect the fact the Lord Mayor’s Show is a “community event”.
“There was no disruption, not even shouting,” said a City of London spokesperson on Saturday’s “walking, marching pageant of the nation’s life”, where the 684th Lord Mayor of London David Wootton was inaugurated with an 123-float procession.
“We are not against the tradition of the ceremony; we are against the undemocratic way the Lord Mayor is elected,” said a spokesperson for the St Paul’s brigade. “So we didn’t interrupt the ceremony as we didn’t want to spoil the mood.”
The non-intervention policy left the streets from Mansion House to the Royal Courts of Justice clear for the three-mile pageant, which involved 6,200 people and over 40 charities, including representatives from the new Mayoral charity appeal Fit for the Future, which will primarily benefit the trauma unit at the Royal London Hospital.
The parade culminated in the Lord Mayor’s fireworks over the river, which made the perfect backdrop, The Capitalist hears, for the wedding of one banker dealing in European debt markets to his paediatrician wife, who started their party with a trip on the London Eye to get the best view of the money-to-burn spectacle.
More bangs, as one wedding guest noted, for his buck.
DOES Andrew Gowers regret being quite so dogmatic on the subject of why Britain should join the euro in his former incarnation as editor of the Financial Times?
While Gowers was at the helm between 2001 and 2005, the pink paper was famously firmly in the single currency camp – but now the euro has wreaked financial devastation and social collapse, the avuncular sage has issued a mea culpa.
“There were strong arguments that the continent of Europe needed greater stability in its currency arrangements,” Gowers told The Capitalist. “But there were birth defects when [the euro model] was designed and the implementation made it worse.”
So theoretically the model was sound, but in practice it was flawed – a PR masterstroke of a U-turn from the man who went on to stage-manage the comms for Lehman “too big to fail” Brothers and BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster.
WHEN you are a woman working in the City, you have got to speak up – in fact, it is “life or death”, says Christine Brown-Quinn, co-founder of the Women in Business Superconference.
No shrinking violet herself – the ex-banker once told her manager at Swiss Bank exactly why he needed her on a project – Brown-Quinn is now telling fellow aspiring professional women “how to compete without becoming a man”.
“It is difficult, but people respect you if you assert yourself – they know you are not a wallflower,” speakers at her conference told delegates from firms including Standard Chartered, KPMG and Reed Smith to the sound of glass ceilings smashing.