The question last year was: who is “City Boy”? The moniker was plastered above
a weekly column in thelondonpaper, which proffered, from the perspective of
a self-proclaimed “remarkably successful stockbroker”, insights into the
egotism, greed and substance abuse that pervades the Square Mile.
The answer, we now know, with the Times serialisation of the columnist's first
book, Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, is 35-year-old Geraint
Anderson, a former utilities research analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort, the
midsized European bank.
But now there's a new question: are Geraint Anderson and City Boy the same
person? The disclaimer at the start of the book - it states, among other
things, that “although real people and places are referred to...they are
intermingled with the fictional people and events that make up the story”...
and “none of the characters or institutions portrayed is in any way based on
real people or banks and any similarity is purely coincidental” - doesn't
really help.
Meanwhile, Anderson, sitting in Dirty Dick's pub near Liverpool Street
station, looking tanned and healthy after having quit his job and taken many
holidays, doesn't provide much clarification. Over 90 minutes and a bottle
of pinot grigio, the son of Lord Anderson of Swansea (formerly a Labour MP),
says variously that “the vast majority” of the book, which recounts how a
student hippy found himself working in the City, “happened”, that elements
are “slightly exaggerated”, that other bits are “massively exaggerated”,
that it is “80 per cent truth”, that it is “a novel more than it is a
memoir”, and that he's not worried about how descriptions of drug abuse will
be received because “it is more fiction than fact”.
It's important to know whether we're discussing a work of fiction or
non-fiction, so end up playing a game of spot the difference between the
lives of Geraint Anderson and Steve Jones, the narrator of the book. Why is
he called Steve Jones? “He's named after the guitarist from the Sex Pistols.
He had to be Welsh because I'm Welsh.” Did you have a ponytail, like Jones?
“Yes. Massive, long ponytail.” Did you, like Jones, have a scooter crash
that made you question the decadent life you were leading? “I did have a
scooter crash, but the timing differs.” What about the £25,000 private-jet
trip to Ibiza, which involved Jones being greeted at the airport by two
naked prostitutes and a drug dealer? “It's exaggerated.” Did you go on a
private jet to Ibiza? “No, it's based on an experience I heard about.” An
e-mail later adds that he has been on similar trips to Miami and Las Vegas.
Did you bet a competitor at another bank £100,000 that you would beat him in
an annual ranking of City analysts? “There was a bet, yeah. But it's
exaggerated.” How exaggerated? “Well,a couple of decimal places. Closer to a
thousand.” How long did your coke habit last? [After long pause] “Can I just
say, I've been a bit naughty?” Did you once suffer a cocaine-induced
nosebleed during a presentation? “OK...it happened early on in my career.”
And so on.
Anderson started writing his City Boy column when the free daily
thelondonpaper was launched in 2006 and did so, he says, because he had
split up with a woman he was due to marry, was “in a strange mental state”
and didn't care if he was fired or not. A wannabe traveller and
self-confessed hippy, he'd drifted into the City and had intended to work
there no more than five years, but ended up spending more than a decade. The
column, proffering the mixture of self-aggrandisement and self-deprecation
you get with the man, was a hit. It attracted a large mailbag, inspired a
storyline about “City Chap” in Alex, The Daily Telegraph City cartoon, and
didn't get Anderson fired - miraculous given his indiscretion.
“Sometimes I got drunk with clients, and they'd say, ‘I wonder who that City
Boy is?' And I, in a fit of stupidity, said, ‘That's me'. I had people in
the office who spotted that it was the language I use. Also, the first
e-mails I sent from my City Boy address had my personal details on them...”
Nevertheless, Anderson survived, was offered a £35,000 book contract and
quit his job. The book is a strange beast, hard to make head or tail of, and
not just because of the questions over veracity. On the one hand it is
poorly edited - jokes repeated, repetition of phrases and suspect joins
where he has used text from his columns. On the other hand it is engaging,
timely and important. Too many young people drift into the City having no
idea of what it entails. The book fills the gap; it is an effective
indictment of the narcissism and decadence of City life.
But I'm not sure about this. While Anderson and Jones do lay into the City,
with the former saying that it “almost destroyed” him, that he hated “doing
something that has no social worth”, they also seem to glory in its
excesses. Anderson remarks, for instance, that the City “brings in shitloads
of taxes for this country”, admits he is “horribly competitive”, complains
that the City is becoming less hedonistic with a new generation “of
automatons” and cannot resist gloating about the money that he's made.
Indeed, he remarks that his last bonus was the biggest he ever received (“in
the region of half a million”), divulges, at my prompting, that he owns
outright a four-bedroom house in Shepherds Bush and that during his career
he accrued between £2.5 million and £3 million.
This paradoxical attitude to the City, and his literary persona, is perhaps
best encapsulated by his remark that he found it “bizarre” that women would
write in to thelondonpaper asking for dates with City Boy when he was “an
arrogant, money-obsessed, competitive, greedy individual” - the “opposite of
what I am” - but at the same time admits that he dated two of them.
Anderson looks taken aback when I suggest that his descriptions of the freely
available sex, drugs and cash might attract some to jobs in the City and
that, perhaps, he loves it more than he hates it. “No, I do hate it. These
people could be doing something useful, like curing cancer or stopping
global warming.”
Which brings us to the book's ending. This last remark encapsulates the
conclusion that Jones reaches. It's asking a lot to have the evil and greed
of the Square Mile highlighted by someone who has benefited from it so long,
but even more difficult to withstand a lecture from him.
“I know what you're going to say - that I've had my cake and eaten it.” Yes, a
£3 million cake. “Yeah, of course. And that's why I'm completely
hypocritical. But I'm giving a lot to charity.”
In the future he wants to write a film script of the book, become a City
commentator and write a second book. I ask him if money is still a
motivation. Or maybe he has enough now. “What's enough?” £3 million? “You
know, people in the City would laugh at that number - they would say you
need £10 to £20 million just to live.” He blinks. “I'm going to come across
like a right tosser for saying that, aren't I?” Well...
EXTRACT
How we ended up back at Sam's remains a mystery. By around 5am The Dealer had
graced us with his presence twice more and coherent speech was sporadic at
best. Everyone seated around Sam's grandmother's ancient dinner table had
exhibited the usual mood swings that a serious gak session invariably
provided. It was while I was in a somewhat edgy, tense dip that I decided to
remind my mates that I existed.
“Boys, all I can say is thank f*** it's a bank holiday today!” Dope dealer and
“artist” Jim was the first to get his insane cackling laughter under control
and shouted: “That's next week!” Within what seemed like seconds I was
running the mile down the road towards my pad. I jumped in the shower. With
my hair still wet I slipped on my Thomas Pink shirt and was struggling to
put on my Gieves & Hawkes suit jacket as I left the house.
During the seemingly endless journey on the Central Line I caught the
reflection of my face in the dark windows of the train and could tell I
looked like shit warmed up. I entered my building, reached my desk at
6.55am. I had five minutes to check out the Reuters headlines in my sector
but these were spent praying that NOTHING WAS GOING TO HAPPEN IN MY SECTOR.
When I saw the red headlines appearing on one of my two head-level screens at
7am informing me that a power station owned by Scottishpower had blown up in
Utah I could feel the life drain out of me. My colleague, The Genius, was on
holiday and I was looking after the companies he analysed. Scottishpower was
one of his key Buy recommendations in the sector we covered and some serious
shit had clearly happened.
Barely a minute passed before my phone rang. I knew it would be my wide-boy
trader Gary asking how he should position himself for the market opening at
8am. With a false confidence that impressed even me, I told Gary: “This is
only a four- or five-pence event. It's a four-hundred-and-thirty megawatt
generation unit that's going to be out of action for around five months.
It's currently making about one million dollars a day so if we tax that at,
let's say, thirtyfive per cent that means Scottishpower's gonna be missing
out on a hundred and three million dollars, ie, around sixty-seven million
pounds sterling assuming a constant exchange rate of one point four five. If
we divide that by one thousand, eight hundred and thirty million shares that
equates to four pence a share.” Gary bought it. The phone trilled again and
this time I saw James Smythe's name flash up. He was in charge of arranging
the 7.20am meeting at which analysts informed traders and salesmen about the
price-sensitive developments in their sector. “Steve, you'd better come down
immediately and give us two minutes on the mike about this incident.” I knew
I couldn't argue and got up and began marching to the lifts.
There are few things like the buzz on a major investment bank's trading floor
on a Monday morning. In an open-plan floor the size of a football pitch,
hundreds of traders, salesmen, market makers and sales traders sit behind
screens desperate to hear or see something that could give them the edge
over competitors. I rushed towards the lectern and began to speak in a slow,
measured tone to the hundreds of busy bees surrounding me about what had
just happened. I occasionally looked up to see my nervous face magnified to
three times its size on the screens that dropped down from the ceiling.
Traders and salesmen at our offices in Frankfurt, Milan, Paris and Madrid
would all be watching my performance.
It was when I got to the valuation implications of the accident that I noticed
that the usual noise and buzz of the floor had dramatically declined. I saw
salesmen nudging each other and pointing towards me and before long everyone
in the desks around me had stopped working and were staring. WHAT WAS GOING
ON? As the drugs mixed with the stress, I felt as if I was in a dream - or,
to be more accurate, a nightmare. It was in this horrific, surreal state
that I must have looked up at the suspended screen in front of me. I noticed
the stream of blood exiting my right nostril, magnified to three times its
size and played out across Europe, I felt it drip on to my lower lip and on
to my shirt. In a spontaneous reaction I pinched my nostrils together with
thumb and forefinger and ran towards the bogs, pushing James Smythe out of
the way with my free hand.
After stuffing some bog roll up my nostril, I tried to nonchalantly walk back
to my chair. A standing ovation broke out amongst my colleagues. I gave a
theatrical bow with fluttering hand movement but despite my bravado I knew
that this was going to take a long time to recover from.
At 8.05am shares in Scottishpower were down ten pence. Gary rang and shouted,
“You said this is a four-pence issue, right? We should have a few down at
these levels, right?” Sticking by my own rule of feigning confidence no
matter how much doubt I felt, I said, “You're damn right. Fill your boots,
mate.” Twenty minutes later the shares were down twenty pence. Gary called
back. “I've bought five-point-two million shares and they're tanking. What
do I do now, dick-splash?” With my voice cracking and my legs nervously
tapping, I tried to bullshit him again: “Hold steady, geezer, them buyers
are gonna come in soon.” This time I could sense that he could tell that I
was f***ed and my confidence drained out of me. I began to call up my
clients in a half-hearted attempt to convince them to buy the shares and so
support the stock.
The buyers never came. Although shares in Scottishpower ended the day down
only eighteen pence, Gary had panicked and sold his holding at the lowest
possible level, when they were twenty-three pence down. The Utah incident
had made the market attribute a huge risk premium to Scottishpower's fleet
of US power stations and this had destroyed the perceived value of the
shares. That's why I lost my bank £1.2 million.
©Geraint Anderson
Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile is published by Headline
Publishing on June 26 at £17.99. It is available from Times BooksFirst for
£16.19, free p&p. 0870 1608080, timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
To see all Geraint Anderson's columns, log on to: thelondonpaper.com/cityboy
Author's note
While this book is true in the sense of being an accurate depiction of a
certain kind of career in the City, none of the characters or institutions
portrayed is in any way based on real people or banks and any similarity is
purely coincidental. Just as “Steve Jones” is not me, so the characters in
the book are made up - they are not any particular person, but are instead
classic City types, and are, hopefully, recognisable as such. Although real
people and places are referred to, they are intermingled with the fictional
people and events. My target has never been any specific individual or
institution, but the culture of the City as a whole.
GERAINT ANDERSON
