Pity the poor investment bankers. If it wasn't bad enough living in daily fear of getting laid off, it appears they are being increasingly refused admission to London's clubs — split into the old, St James's variety and new media haunts for arty types, with nowhere left for the suits.

“We don't want the archetypal City idiot, waving his cash about at the bar and braying like a buffoon and annoying women,” says Jonathan Downey, owner of the trendy East Room Club in Shoreditch, in a hilarious Bloomberg feature.
Mark Wakefield, of the Quintessentially concierge service, identifies club owners' reasoning: “Lawyers, bankers, even property developers, they're not that keen on. They want creative people.”

Even if bankers do sneak memberships of trendy joints like Covent Garden's Bungalow 8, they look totally out of place, he says.

The pinstripes are wonderfully aggrieved.
“To reject only on the point that they're coming from a banking background, it's like —discrimination,” says Georgios Ouzounis, a Kyte Capital hedgie.

“I feel hurt — well not hurt, but I feel brought down to earth,” says Daniel Hernandez, derivatives trader at Commerzbank. Jake Turner, a glum, but self-knowing trader at Citigroup, says: “I wouldn't want to be a member. I wouldn't talk to anyone because I wouldn't be cool enough.”

* Clients visiting the Covent Garden offices of wealth manager Cheviot Securities the other day were disturbed to see senior members of staff in one corner of the trading floor applying liberal layers of make-up to their faces.

They need not have worried — the gloss was being applied in order that they could have their photographs taken for the in-house sales brochure.
However, City Spy wants to know if the claim that one of them later headed out for lunch insisting on still wearing the slap is true?

* Estate agents in London are comparing the housing market with a department store sale — all that's left is the cheap stuff that nobody wanted in the first place.

So sweet for Google fat-cats

A vending machine down the hall that charges more money depending on how unhealthy the snack is? That's what the workers at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley see every day.

A couple of employees developed a snack-unhealthiness formula and incorporated it into the machine. Snacks cost a cent per gram of sugar; two cents per gram of fat; four cents per gram of saturated fat and a dollar per gram of trans-fat.

So American favourites such as Cornnuts cost 20 cents, a fancy Lindt chocolate bar is $1.50 but a tiny package of chocolate chip cookies
is $4.55.

* Magic Circle law firm, Linklaters prides itself on attention to detail. However, that didn't stop it branding corporate mugs with a pretty shocking spelling mistake. “Linklaters” screams the mug — until hot water is added and the motto “thirst for knowlege” appears.

* Markets Live, the FT website's daily stock market commentary, is signalling a potential disaster: David Buik of BGC Partners is on holiday. “Let's hope there are no big business stories, otherwise the broadcast media will be lost for comment.”

The odd case of Alan's odds

Bookies need to talk up their book in the dog days of August. Is this why the chances of Health Secretary Alan Johnson being the next leader of the Labour Party have been cut from
7-1 to 5-1?

“We have seen a rush of support for Johnson to be the man the Party turns to when Gordon Brown steps down,” says a spokesman for Hills.

Odd, when virtually all of Westminster has decamped to Tuscany, the Dordogne or this year, to Beijing.

Favourite David Miliband is still a long shot at 2-1.

Watch for when someone is made odds-on — then you'll know that some real money has arrived.

Money's no object for a Roman soldier

Where Roman Abramovich goes, his right-hand man Eugene Shvidler is not far behind. The energy tycoon, who heads Abramovich's asset management company Millhouse and is credited with orchestrating the purchase of Chelsea, has paid £7 million for a house in Snowmass, Colorado. It comes after Abramovich paid around £25 million for two houses in the same town.

The ski-in, ski-out, house of 6000 square feet has six bedrooms and six bathrooms. The owners said they asked for £7 million and were offered an extra £250,000 as a clincher.

A source close to the deal said: "Money was no object. We set a very high price and they not only matched it, they added a bit on as well!"

* THE new “authorised” biography of the world's richest man, Warren Buffett, due out in the US, is called The Snowball: How Warren Buffett Collected Friends, Wisdom and Wealth.
The title is based on a comment by Buffett: “Life is like a snowball. The really important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill.” The smartest guy on the Street and he sounds like Forrest Gump.

* Is Philip Dorgan of Panmure Gordon a class warrior? A note advising clients to sell Sainsbury shares says that sales of organic vegetables will drop, “faltering under middle class reversion to traditional values, ie, say one thing do another”. Cut it out Dorgan. Now.

* “It was like The Wolseley and The Ivy rolled into one. So many faces were there. Michael Spencer, Martin Sorrell, Mervyn Davies...” A visitor returns from the Beijing Olympics.

* Up all night? Reports reach City Spy that on his recent sojourn in Ibiza, Sir Philip Green was still going strong in Pacha at 6am...

* In Scott's restaurant, a well-known PR was overheard saying to his guest: “They're not a client, so I can tell the truth.”

Send us your city spy stories @ cityspy@standard.co.uk