Cityboy unmasked
The way he tells it, Geraint Anderson has been causing trouble since he was in short trousers. In his new book, Cityboy, the former stockbroker exposes the secret world
of the Square Mile. And, he tells Amanda Constance, this is only the beginning
Above: Cityboy, Geraint Anderson photographed by Vincent Starr
Geraint Anderson opens his front door looking a little bleary-eyed. He sheepishly explains that he has been ‘partying for five days at a stately home in Devon’. Later, as he makes us tea, sunglasses firmly in place, I nose around the kitchen of his Shepherd’s Bush home. Pictures of Anderson at play with friends adorn the fridge. I’m struck by an arresting photograph of a stunning woman with eyes like saucers walking out of a pool wearing nothing more than a large python around her neck. ‘Oh, I don’t know her,’ says Anderson, with a regretful hoot, ‘she was some woman at a party in Ibiza’. Welcome to the world of ‘Cityboy’.
For the past 18 months, Cityboy has been the pen name of an anonymous columnist in thelondonpaper. A City confessional, its riotous tales of egos and excess, written with biting wit and a revolutionary zeal, has made it the paper’s most popular column. At the end of June, when a novel of the same name was published, it was Anderson who was unmasked as Cityboy.
To call the book an eye-opener on life in the Square Mile is an understatement. It’s a warts and all, white-knuckle ride through the City of the last decade, a cesspool of rampant egotism and ambition, where backstabbing and braggadocio are currencies as common as any traded by brokers and any show of humanity considered a sign of weakness. Salaries are mind-boggling and Michelin-starred meals accompanied by £1,000 bottles of wine a matter of course, as are six-figure corporate ‘jollies’, mountains of cocaine and Bacchanalian levels of partying.
Enter, stage left, Cityboy. A young hippy, he falls into a job as a stockbroker and starts to make big bucks. As he gets more successful, he slowly becomes the shallow, ruthless, money-obsessed monster he thought he had always despised. In revealing the dark underbelly of the City, Anderson’s timing couldn’t be better. As the credit crunch bites, interest in our financial hub has never been greater. Anderson’s summation that ‘It’s a tight-knit club for making mostly white, young, mostly heterosexual men as much cash as quickly as possible’, won't surprise many of us, but it won’t be winning him friends in the Square Mile. ‘Obviously the city will pay some contract killers to get me when the book comes out,’ he laughs.
It’s hard to imagine this slightly built, self-contained 35-year-old who is now relaxing in his garden with a peppermint tea as the person behind the cocaine-fuelled, ‘Loadsamoney’ Cityboy. He has the air of a mild-mannered academic, an intellectual with Trotskyite facial hair. But Anderson and I have known each other for 20 years, since we were teenagers at school in West London, and he’s always been too clever by half. His way with words led some teenage wit amongst us to nickname him ‘Shakespeare’. He’s always had a dry, laconic humour, there’s a quip for everything, coupled with an intense energy, that meant the quiet life never beckoned.
Anderson once told me that he gatecrashed all the May balls one summer when he was at Cambridge just to see if he could. And on the photoshoot for this piece he talked his way into his old school, Laytmer Upper in Hammersmith to get some pictures. He has, he admits, a natural talent for ‘bullshitting’, which helped him go a long way in the City. ‘My mother once said: “Only boring people get bored.”’
‘I think that I have always been a wrong ‘un’’, says Anderson. He was expelled from his Montessori nursery school in Holland Park at the age of four after just one hour for ‘hassling all the girls. Something I’ve been doing for the last 35 years,’ he laughs. He’s always had a prodigious appetite for partying, although he denies the £25,000 long-weekend in Ibiza, so memorably described in Cityboy, was based on personal experience. ‘Most of the things in the book are true but they may not have all happened to me. And if Mum and Dad are reading, the stuff about drugs and orgies is definitely nothing to do with me.’
Anderson is still close to his family – he grew up in Clarendon Road in Holland Park, the youngest of three brothers – and when we meet he is apprehensive about their reaction to the book. His father is the Labour peer, Lord Anderson of Swansea, his mother a ‘hardcore Methodist’. Anderson claims his upbringing was both socialist and religious (one of his brothers is now a vicar in Syracuse in Sicily). Anderson spurned his religious upbringing at the age of 13 but still goes to church at Christmas, ‘otherwise I don’t get my Christmas lunch’. So is the partying a reaction to his childhood? ‘If I’m still rebelling at 35 there must be something wrong. My uncle Keith, a very wise man, said don’t be a smoking, drinking, gambling, drugtaking, womaniser Geraint. Choose two and do them really well – let’s just say I don’t gamble or smoke.’
So just how much of Cityboy is autobiographical? The main character in the book is called Steve but, to those in the know, he’s very much like the author. ‘Yes,’ admits Anderson, ‘Steve’s personal biography is suspiciously similar to mine... I was a hippy – I was doing a Masters.’
Anderson had qualms about working in the City. ‘I thought, I’ll do it for five years. That was 12 years ago. Unfortunately, those nasty people in investment banks keep on giving you more and more cash so you become like the bank robber who says, “I’ll just do one last job”.’
‘I did make more and more money but I never became quite as monstrous as the character in the book’, he says, although he admits that ‘things did get a bit silly’.
Anderson said the wake-up call came when ‘I went into a tailspin after splitting up with the woman I was going to marry . That made me think about what I was doing with my life.’ When an old friend at thelondonpaper approached him to write a column, he jumped at the chance. ‘It allowed me to vent my vitriol and may have saved me from a nervous breakdown.’
If Anderson’s ‘man-on-the-edge’ quality makes the book compelling, it his serious analysis of the City that represent the book’s strongest moments. Whether it’s hedge funders, the effects of 9/11, the bonus system, Enron or more recent events such the run on Northern Rock, Anderson’s take on these events is informative, articulate and highly readable.
For Anderson, Cityboy isn’t just about dishing the dirt. He wants it to matter. ‘It’s a moral crusade I’m on a mission here’. To whit, the book is peppered with idealistic outbursts. ‘You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to work out that maybe some of my zeal is derived from my upbringing,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I’m going to save the world, I’d just prefer to be part of the solution, rather than the problem’. For now, the solution is writing books ‘that help people question a ruthless dog-eat-dog world that’s not particularly healthy.’
Anderson is expecting a huge bag of hate mail. Here he is, sitting pretty at 35, worth somewhere between £2-3 million (‘not much in City terms’), bleating on about the system that has made him rich. Is he a hypocrite? He laughs. ‘That does need to be addressed somewhat.’ But he hopes to channel some of his energy into working for a charity. ‘If I don’t then I will have failed in some way.’
Not many people live the dream of retiring from the City at a relatively young age, financially secure and able to do whatever they want. ‘The big man upstairs was looking out for me,’ agrees Anderson. Plans now include a film script of Cityboy and ‘obviously wife, kids, house in the country, a house in northern Spain and a pied-à-terre in London’. Although, there’s a quip – there’s always got to be a quip – ‘the most hilarious thing would be if I got sued for the book. Imagine that? I spend 12 long years struggling away, I retire, my ego dictates I write a book and I lose all my money. Now that would be funny.’
Cityboy by Geraint Anderson, Headline, £16.99