BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews lunched today at the W-lbrook Club, in London’s The City, as the guest of a French investment bank.

Despite the indignity of having to wear a house tie, I was completely won over by the club and resolved to join immediately, or just as soon as I become a wealthy industrialist. With just three rooms and a bar, the W-lbrook is a cosy affair. It was founded in 2000 as a simple City dining club, so it has none of the dusty, oppressive history of the Mayfair bruisers. The décor is modest yet quirky: the old-school portraits are there, but mixed in with 1920s cartoon sketches and Edwardian architectural drawings. Although I didn’t see it, the club’s Oak Room is apparently decorated with celluloids from the Beatles film Yellow Submarine, alongside Sir Peter Blake’s paintings of wrestlers.

And when I saw the massive model of the ocean liner Saturnia behind the bar, it was, of course, love at first sight.

After a quick drink in the bar, around thirty press and bankers assembled in the upstairs dining room for lunch and a presentation. The food was excellent, as you would expect from a French bank. A few glasses of fine wine took the edge of TUPNews’ boat race-induced hangover.

Seated on my left was a darling young girl from the Dow Jones newswire, bright-eyed and bird-like, who charmed me off the table. But to my right, more excitingly, was Caroline Hayas, the chief energy reporter for the Financial Times.

To me, FT writers are celebrities. They’re not that much better than other City hacks – my journalism heroes all work at The Sun - but when you read their stuff every day, you can’t help but feel excited when you actually meet one. I have no desire to work for a daily, but for the pink ‘un I might make an exception.

Hayas was just like I expected: a slim, elegant woman in her early thirties, doubtless a graduate of the LSE or Sorbonne or something, putting sharp questions to the brass one minute and telling us cute anecdotes about her two-year-old the next. Brilliant. People always tell me that City journalism is a male-dominated line of work – this might be the case statistically, but it always seems that the quality hacks are girls. Two of my last three editors, for instance.

Before I left I went for a slash. The marble urinals had a frosted glass piss-guard about eighteen inches high, which kept my marvellous shoes safe from errant flecks. Genius.