Claim e32f8a72Checked 09 Jul 2026
TrueOn the truth scale
“There was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all.”
Interpreted asallusion
“The City still had an old-fashioned, P. G. Wodehouse-like feel.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
The claim is supported for the period Farage is describing. Historians of the City note that, before the 1986 Big Bang reforms, the Stock Exchange jobbing system reflected a highly personal, clubby trading culture, and The Guardian’s history of the pre-Big Bang City describes it as a small world of ‘public school chaps’ who knew and socialized with one another. Academic work on Wodehouse’s *Psmith in the City* also depicts the City as a socially coded, clubland-like environment, which makes the Wodehouse comparison plausible. So saying the City still had an old-fashioned, Wodehouse-like feel is broadly true for that era, even though that atmosphere was already waning and was largely dismantled by Big Bang in 1986. Sources: Institute of Historical Research, ‘The jobbing system of the London Stock Exchange: an oral history’; The Guardian, ‘Special report: an outsider’s guide to the City of London’; R. C. Michie, *Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914*; The Independent, ‘The sun sets on the City of London’.
From article
The pressure of being a market-maker in a busy market, when you’ve got people all around you screaming and shouting at you and you’re dealing in numbers and it’s like that, that, that, that – that’s pretty pressurised. That’s why it’s a young man’s job. You don’t get many 50-year-old money-brokers: they can’t do it any more. Goodness me! It’s not an easy job. Not an easy job.
When I joined the City, it was the dying days of a gentlemen’s club: magnificent, socially wonderful but going nowhere – there was still a whiff of P G Wodehouse about people who toddled off to the City all day and did things that nobody understood at all. But what I saw in the Eighties and Nineties was London becoming in many ways a genuine global centre for entrepreneurial flair, for innovation, for very hard work – and for creating profits. And without those profits we can’t have the schools and hospitals we need in this country – it’s very, very simple. I am absolutely not conflicted in any way at all about the fact that what we did, overall, was for a social good.
Sources opened+ 162 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |
| [2] | theguardian.com |
| [3] | nnty.fun |
| [4] | archives.history.ac.uk |