Is Lord Mayor Roger Gifford finally unleashing his inner Boris?

A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the long-gone Midland Bank stands apparently abandoned by its oligarch owner, facing the avant-garde pink edifice that replaced the Victorian ‘Mappin & Webb Corner’. The skyline gives glimpses of the Lloyd’s Building from 1986, the Gherkin from 2003 and the ‘Walkie-Talkie’ conceived in 2007, due to be completed next year; each a monument to the boom that preceded the bust. Representing the self-confident 1750s is the Mansion House itself, last bastion of the City’s pomp and temporary home to Roger Gifford, its 685th Lord Mayor. In such a changed and changing place, with so many stains on its name, what’s the point — I wonder as I ring the doorbell — of a fancy-dress figurehead at the apex of what is still widely seen, despite efforts towards transparency, as a quasi-masonic Corporation of sheriffs, aldermen, chamberlain and remembrancer? Indeed, what’s the point of this ceremonial ‘Lord Mayor’ at all when London at large has, in Boris Johnson, a real mayor with a million votes who not only defends financiers more robustly than any practitioner or PR man would dare, but also habitually upstages every other public figure who claims to represent the capital? The genial Mr Gifford isn’t buying these arguments.