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I was sacked for lifting the lid on the City's macho drinking culture
Robert Lea and Valentine Low07.03.08
She is the trader who penned a devastating account of sex, drink and racism in the City - only to find herself out of a job.
Now the blonde nicknamed Posh Bird has hit back at her former employer Cantor Fitzgerald with more tales of epic drunken lunches and laddish nights at lap dancing clubs. She tells of turning up for work after two hours' sleep, still drunk from the night before, and the casual racism of fellow traders who use expressions such as "Feargal Sharkey", Cockney rhyming slang for "darkie".
Ex-public schoolgirl Venetia Thompson, 23, an interdealer broker also known by colleagues as Airbags "on account of my breasts", was suspended from her £50,000-a-year job by Cantors two weeks ago after she first wrote in the Spectator.
Writing in today's Daily Telegraph, she said that racist abuse, macho behaviour and drunkenness were widespread. "Pulling a colleague off their chair in a headlock, calling someone 'Ferg' or 'wiki' [another term of racist abuse], hurling a keyboard in fury or getting so drunk that you have to have your car keys wrestled away from you are, it seems, all acceptable forms of behaviour. Writing about it is apparently gross misconduct."
Asked by Cantors' head of human resources to name the person who had used the expression "Feargal Sharkey" - and faced with the suggestion that she made up the anecdotes - she wrote: "I stopped short of asking her if she had also wanted the names of people who had said 'wiki-waki' or 'jungle bunny' over the past year."
She describes Cantors as "one of the City's most aggressive and male-dominated firms" where she was among a handful of women "surrounded by hundreds of Essex boys".
She loved the life, however. "It is a little unexpected to find a public school girl from Devon receiving lap dances alongside her clients but it was a world I relished being part of. I was addicted to the adrenaline, the noise, the aggression and, of course, the entertaining."
She tells of a six-hour lunch which began with a colleague asking the waiter to "keep each bottle under 600" and ended with them drinking three bottles of vintage pink champagne, three of red wine, two of white and numerous glasses of dessert wine and cognac at £50 a go.
That night she went to a party and got back home at 4.30am - but was back at her desk at 7am. "Was I still a little drunk? Perhaps, along with every other trader and broker at the party. The reality is that half the City is functioning on very little sleep at least two days a week, and more often than not, still drunk from the night before."
Cantors declined to comment. The firm has had a reputation as one of the City's raciest and most testosterone-driven. During a court case in 2002 it was claimed that senior executives suggested to staff that they "go whoring" after dinner.
