The City warmed to David Laws because he knew how to play the bonus game

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

‘Does anyone remember David Laws?’ a former City colleague asked me during the brief interlude between the Lib Dem MP’s debut as financial secretary last Monday and his descent into hell on Friday. Judging by the sketchy accounts of his banking career in the weekend papers, with their references to a ‘billion-dollar gamble’ that made him a ‘multimillionaire’, few journalists bothered to track down City sources who really knew him in those days. But in fact he held the same title of managing director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW, the forerunner of Barclays Capital) that I once held myself. Laws joined BZW from JPMorgan shortly after I made an unexpected exit, so we never met, but several chums of mine worked alongside him. They remember a bright but cold fish who kept himself to himself (for reasons we now understand) amid the swaggering machismo of the trading floor.

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