18 SEPTEMBER 1993, Page 25

Small town in Germany

THE CITY of London has pitched for Europe's central bank in rather the same way that the City of Manchester has pitched for the Olympics. The campaign has been a good advertisement, and second place would be a satisfactory result and save a lot of trouble. What mattered for London was not to lose the bank to another city with pretensions to being a financial centre. No one could call Bonn that. Its claims are that it is (a) in Germany and (b) full of office buildings which will need ten- ants when the government moves to Berlin. Welcome to Docklands-am-Rhein. Now that the cause of European monetary union has taken a great leap backwards, there will be nothing much to do in Bonn, but then, there never was.