Dominic Midgley

Dominic Midgley says a great institution of national life is under threat from the credit crunch, the smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze — but there are signs of hope The sounds of merry-making could be heard from the street as 300 journalists, suppliers and associated hangers-on gathered at The Northcote pub in Clapham last month to toast the opening of Geronimo Inns’ latest outlet. Geronimo’s founder Rupert Clevely, the amiable former marketing director of Veuve Clicquot champagne, was on hand to dole out wine and press the flesh as he celebrated his sixth opening of the year. All in all, it was like a scene from a film set in a happier world before the term ‘credit crunch’ had been invented.

Porsche and Aston Martin haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the recent boom in City bonuses. There’s a new generation of customers at Holland and Holland, Barbour and Land Rover — stockbrokers, traders and lawyers who are swapping their pinstripes for plus-fours of a weekend, and heading to the country for a spot of shooting. Hunting with foxes may be in abeyance but when the roe deer stalking season begins on the first of next month, there will be more takers than ever, and all the big banks have started organising shooting days at venues like Bisley and the Royal Berkshire Shooting Ground. The Holy Grail for this new breed of young, competitive hunters is something called the ‘McNab’.

Think Formula 1 and it’s not long before a short man with a terrible haircut and an unfeasibly tall wife comes to mind. But while Bernie Ecclestone is very much the face of the world’s premier motor-racing series, it’s a different story with A1 Grand Prix. This weekend the upstart rival to Formula 1 will be staging demonstration races in Manchester to promote the alternative high-octane racing series it holds in the Formula 1 off-season, the northern hemisphere winter. A1 has a short but intriguing history. It was inaugurated last year by one of the younger members of Dubai’s ruling family and a controversial South African entrepreneur who made a small fortune from a transport company in the post-apartheid era.

The news that Michael Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, is to become the European chairman of Diligence, a US-based corporate intelligence company, is the latest sign of gentrification in a sector that was once seen as the preserve of shifty types who rifle through bins under cover of darkness. There is still a role for that sort of operator, but as the commercial investigation game gets serious, a growing number of private investigators have a background in investment banking or the law. Indeed, one security industry analyst, Equitable Services, has predicted that the global private security market could be worth £150 billion by 2010, fuelled by mushrooming demand for high-quality commercial intelligence.

Herbert Smith, a firm of City solicitors, last month announced that it had hired its first ‘inclusivity manager’. There were chortles all round, and the Times ran a short piece about the appointment under the headline ‘Political correctness seems to have broken out at one of London’s top legal firms’. The caravan swiftly moved on, but the recruitment of Carolyn Lee by one of the ‘Magic Circle’ of leading law partnerships is the latest sign that the City is coming to terms with the realities of modern life. While the number of women in the professional workforce has mushroomed in recent years and a tolerance of male chauvinist piggery has correspondingly diminished, the City has remained a male-dominated bastion where old habits die hard.