Boris on the warpath on Standard Chartered

Boris Johnson is the Spectator’s diarist this week, and as you’d expect, his piece in tomorrow’s magazine is full of wonderful Borisisms including cyclists who ‘wave their bottoms at each other like courting pigeons’ and ‘luscious gold doubloon’. But the Mayor of London also launches an attack on America and the way ‘some New York regulator’ has set upon Standard Chartered. He writes:

I mean, what is all this stuff about Standard Chartered? This British bank has generally enjoyed a high reputation for probity (as these places go) until yesterday, when some New York regulator apparently denounced Standard as a ‘rogue institution’. Well, if people have broken the law of this country, then by all means bang them away. But you can’t help wondering whether all this beating up of British banks and bankers is starting to shade into protectionism; and you can’t help thinking it might actually be at least partly motivated by jealously of London’s financial sector – a simple desire to knock a rival centre.