It seems that another outsider may be trying to clamber aboard the complicated, rule-strewn bandwagon that is City politics. Alison Gowman, the alderman in the ward of Dowgate, is standing for re-election after her six-year term expired. But an unknown candidate has put himself or herself forward.

To be an alderman, you have to be a JP or, if you are not, apply to the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee for the right to be one. Said candidate is not a JP and so is being given time to gain the necessary clearance.

This could take a couple of months and until then names are not disclosed, presumably to save any blushes if they are turned down. In the last year, of the past six elections in the City, four have been contested, something that would have been unthinkable once.

“It's no surprise. We're well into our modernising period,” a Guildhall mole explains, “which started around 1215.”

The naked truth

Geraint Anderson, your 15 minutes are up. The former City trader who wrote a book as Cityboy has made a video and a single. What few proceeds it garners will go to Shelter, but, having seen it, I'm in no mood to be charitable.

Cityboy has a penchant for taking his clothes off - he was filmed doing so at Glastonbury - and he is clearly an exhibitionist, to say the least. “My motivation is not just to feed my huge pulsating ego,” he assures me. Geraint, you said it.

Tonight at the Games, judo, or is it boxing?

The high ideals of Baron Pierre de Coubertin were a little thin on the ground at a recent gathering at Lloyds TSB's Gresham Street HQ of business people to consider the opportunities offered by the Olympics. The bank fielded various speakers, including a senior economist.

My informant says one of the suits present made a nuisance of himself, was confronted physically by another member of the audience and then thrown out.

“One of our speakers did get a little more than they bargained for from a member of the audience,” the bank confirms. “It was a bit more Jeremy Paxman than Amir Khan.”

Was he thrown out? “He left.” Before the end of the meeting? “I believe so.” And that angry member of the audience? “One person had a conversation with him and then he left.”

Boys, boys . . .

No, not that ninja

Oh dear. Tata's financial services arm has announced a tie-up with the Japanese bank Mizuho to offer “ninja loans”.

In Japan a ninja loan is a kind of syndicated corporate debt, well understood. Everywhere else it is equally well understood to be an acronym for “no income, no job”.

Cue an immediate clarification from Tata after much of the Indian press concluded that it was opening some sort of dedicated sub-prime loan company.

Aren't marketing men paid to spot this sort of thing coming?

What's in a name?

Dong Energy is the curiously named power firm part-owned by the Danish Government that wants to build a wind farm in the Thames. It abandoned a plan to float earlier this year.

I'm informed that the senior Citigroup banker who worked on the float was nicknamed King Dong. Childish, I know.

Oil biz becomes Viz biz

This must be the first time that the rising price of oil and the economy has attracted the attention of Viz, the unbelievably crude satirical magazine. Someone who is, frankly, too old to read it, points out that the current edition has a “news” story, wedged between the Fat Slags, Drunken Bakers, et al, about violent incidents around the country.

Gordon Brown is quoted as saying, probably inaccurately: “I urge the British population not to form themselves into marauding, lawless gangs of leather-clad misfits and outlaws, stopping at nothing to get hold of fuel for their fleets of homemade, customised pursuit vehicles.”

Though come to think of it, given some recent No10 PR gaffes...

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