CITY AND SUBURBAN
No prize for floral decorations in the City's beauty contest . . .
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
The Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London have a message for you. In these anxious times it is right that the City fathers should give a lead, and, so that no one can miss it, they have proc- laimed it on great banners, strung across the streets and suspended from the bridges. They want you to know that the flower show is on at Guildhall. I think that this rustic event gives me hay fever, for it certainly gets up my nose. Nothing else prompts the City to hoist these headline banners. There is no other message that the Corporation chooses to deliver, but back they come, season after season to remind us of the only event which the City of London has in common with Moreton- in-Marsh. If the City fathers really have nothing more instructive to say to their visitors and their ratepayers, they would do better to keep quiet. The visitors still flood in. The Stock Exchange gets a quarter of a million of them, year by year, in its gallery overlooking the trading floor, even though stocks and shares no longer change hands there. The Exchange does its best, showing them films, letting them play with machines, offering posters and books and badges - blowing its own trumpet. That is not the Corporation's style. Conscious of its civic dignity, unwilling to seem vulgar or commercial, it would rather blow some- body else's trumpet, distant though it might be. That was how it got caught up, a few months ago, in a television fund- raising show. By way of a supporting act, the Lord Mayor agreed to be rowed down river at the head of a Jacobean water- pageant. It was thought that City firms and institutions would pay for this by financing the floating floats. One barge represented (to the eye of faith) the financial futures market, but most of the prospective spon- sors kept their hands in their pockets. Some took the view that they already paid the highest rates in the country, some were content to support their own charities, some may have been so vulgarly commer- cial as to wonder what was in it for them. It all left the Corporation with a six-figure bill which was not in its budget. Some of the recrimination stuck, as it does, to the outside firm which advises the Corporation on its publicity, and now the fathers have decided to stage a beauty contest, in which firms are invited to tender for the account and say how they would handle it.
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