Taking a stick to the City hasn’t worked, so why not try knighthoods as carrots?

It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses.

It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses. Statistically, your chance of a gong this time was many times higher if you had designed an exciting range of lingerie (Michelle Mone, creator of the Ultimo cleavage-enhancing bra, picked up an OBE) than if you had come up with an exciting range of collateralised debt obligations.