Tales of the City

As the anonymous newspaper columnist Cityboy, Notting Hill-born Geraint Anderson unveiled the secret world of the Square Mile. Amanda Constance meets him

Geraint Anderson opens his front door looking 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 tales of egos and excess, written with biting wit and a revolutionary zeal, have made it the paper’s most popular column. At the end of June, when a novel of the same name was published, it was Geraint who was unmasked as Cityboy.
To call the book an eye-opener on life in the Square Mile is an understatement. It’s a  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 and £1,000 bottles of wine a matter of course, as are six-figure corporate “jollies”, mountains of cocaine and Bacchanalians levels of partying.
Enter 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, Geraint’s timing couldn’t be better. As the credit crunch bites, interest in our financial hub has never been greater. Geraint’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 as the person behind the cocaine-fuelled, Loadsamoney Cityboy. But Geraint 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 with an intense energy that meant the quiet life never beckoned.
“I think that I have always been a wrong ‘un,” Geraint says. He was expelled from his 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.”
Geraint is still close to his family - he grew up in Clarendon Road, the youngest of three brothers - and he is apprehensive about their reaction to the book. His father is  Labour peer Lord Anderson of Swansea, his mother a “hardcore Methodist”.
So just how much of Cityboy is autobiographical? The main character 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.”
Geraint said he 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 cash so you become like the bank robber who says, ‘I’ll just do one last job’. 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.”
If Anderson's ‘man-on-the-edge’ quality makes the book compelling, his serious analysis of the City represents the book's strongest moments. Whether it’s hedge funders, the effects of 9/11, bonuses, Enron or the run on Northern Rock, Geraint’s take on these events is informative, articulate and highly readable.   But for Geraint, Cityboy isn’t just about dishing the dirt. He wants it to matter. “It’s a moral crusade; I’m on a mission here.”
Geraint is expecting a huge bag of hate mail. Here he is, sitting pretty at 35, worth more than £2 million (“not much in City terms”), bleating on about the system that has made him rich. Is he a hypocrite? He laughs. 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.”   l

Cityboy – Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile by Geraint Anderson, Headline, £16.99