Knock, knock! A toast to the City’s peerless chronicler and jokesmith

Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A Club No More, the last volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial history of the Square Mile. In the lighter field of daily and weekly journalism, Christopher has been peerless in his combination of wit, learning, firmness of judgment, appetite for gossip and enthusiasm for lunch — preferably at the Savoy Grill before its tragic refurbishment.

As the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, wrote in his introduction to A City Spectator, the selection from City and Suburban which I assembled in 2004, Christopher has combined ‘a real affection for the City — both old and new — with a readiness to be trenchantly critical when the occasion demands, criticism which is all the more effective when it comes from a know-ledgeable friend’.