WOMEN across the City donned their best frocks for a pre-screening of the Sex and the City movie last week. One pre-show party at Taman Gang, the exclusive club on Park Lane, promised Cosmopolitans and canapés served by “Butlers in the Buff”.

The turnout for the bash was enormous, with ladies from Gartmore, Norwich Union and Friends Provident in attendance. There were also plenty of butlers but, alas, they were not, as promised, “in the buff”.

Normally, the stripped-off servers wear nothing more than a bow tie, cuffs and a micro black pinnie to preserve their modesty. But, somewhat disappointingly, these boys wore black trousers with their bow ties, ensuring that gawping was kept to a minimum.

Because this was a room full of women it didn’t take long for the rumours to start flying as to why the butlers were more over-dressed than usual . “One of the insurance companies probably objected,” said a very disgruntled female fund manager. Another theory was that a bank had threatened to cancel unless the bevy of butlers covered up.

So who was the prude in the City who banned the buns?

It turned out that the decision was that of the party’s organisers, Mark Butler Associates.

A spokeswoman for the company said that it had taken “an executive decision” to get the butlers to wear trousers. “We didn’t want to have anything too risqué,” she said.

It seems, though, that not all in the Square Mile have lost their appetite for scantily clad bodies.

The City-based strip club For Your Eyes Only sent out an upbeat press release last week to let us all know that “business is booming”.

The managers expect their newly opened City Road branch to turn over more than £5m this year, and the 200 dancers are hoping to earn around £3m between them. Proof indeed that there is still Sex in the City.

- WE hear grumblings from those with the leather elbow patches at the London School of Economics and other cathedrals of knowledge. It’s not the economy per se that they’re carping about, but one of its commentators: LSE director and former FSA chairman Sir Howard Davies.

Davies, it seems, has been only too happy to give his tuppence worth on the credit crisis to anybody who will listen. He told a bleary-eyed nation on the Today programme that the country’s chances of avoiding recession were “pretty slight”. In another lecture on the economy he warned that “credit will be restricted for some time with serious consequences for the US economy”.

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