Icily regular
I FORECAST a stampede into the only safe job left in the City. Unease in the stock markets, where so few firms are busy enough to keep themselves warm, has given way to fright, and the wine-bar talk is all of who will pull out and how many more jobs will go. Hurry, hurry, then to become a compliance officer. It is not exactly fun — a form-filling, number-crunching, rule- bound routine of making sure all the new regulations are observed. The compliance officer is to his City firm what the company secretary is in the wider world of business — the receptacle for all such blame as cannot otherwise conveniently be disposed of. Almost every firm, though, must have one, some firms find they need dozens, and demand remains strong. A survey the other day brought them out as the fastest risers in the City salary league — up, in the last year, by 40 per cent. It is the way the City is going — a place where nothing improper is allowed to happen, and no- thing at all happens. Tennyson had the phrase for it: 'Icily regular, splendidly null.'
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