Nick Anstee is the 682nd Lord Mayor of London, with a career stretching over three decades as a City accountant. In another reality he could have been flying Tornadoes for the RAF.

He took office yesterday at Guildhall and today leads the Lord Mayor’s Show, the traditional start of the year of office. Mr Anstee, who works in the corporate practice of the City lawyer SJ Berwin, is the son of an RAF pilot who commanded the last squadron to fly Canberras and then served as air attaché at British embassies.

“I had a rather peripatetic existence,” he says. His father sent him back to boarding school in the UK. “I left the people I knew and came back to a country I had never really known.” At the age of 16 he applied for a flying scholarship, went to Biggin Hill for the relevant exams and failed. He could have reapplied later. “I took that as a signal that it meant that option wasn’t open to me.”

He looked at becoming a commercial pilot but the airlines were contracting. Instead he found a job, at 19, with Moore Stephens, the City accountant.

A chance meeting a few months ago with a fellow pupil from Stamford School in Lincolnshire showed him what might have been. Simon Bryant had been two years ahead of him, had gone for the same RAF exams and passed. He is now Air Vice Marshal Simon Bryant, Chief of Staff for personnel, the No 3 position in the RAF.

“Do I regret it? You can’t have regrets. I moved on and I enjoy what I’m doing.” He retains an interest in the service, though. In March he went up with the Red Arrows and he will support various fundraising efforts for servicemen in his year in office, including a dinner at Guildhall to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. A keen runner who took part in the recent New York Marathon, he will run the London event next year with the Red Arrows team.

Unlike some Lord Mayors, Mr Anstee is a local. He has lived in the Barbican for 32 years and his three daughters attended the City of London School for Girls nearby. His career took him into insolvency practice, then in its infancy, and then into the equally nascent area of private equity, where he worked with industry titan Jon Moulton when at Schroders.

“I’ve been beautifully hedged between corporate finance in the boom times and insolvency in the bad times. That workload kept me going — it gave me perhaps a little bit more job security than others.” That security was to evaporate. He was at Arthur Andersen and moved with many others to Deloitte & Touche in 2002 after the Enron scandal sank the firm. The move did not pan out and for 18 months Mr Anstee was job-hunting. He had served as a Sheriff in 2003-04 and was set to become Lord Mayor in 2006 but his career break made this impossible. It was also going to prove difficult to find an employer who would promptly allow him to take off the year needed for mayoral duties.

He signed with SJ Berwin. “No sooner had I joined than the market turned,” he says. The corporate finance side became, inevitably, less busy, which made a year off as Lord Mayor a practical prospect. “We were able to come to an arrangement.”

Jonathan Blake, senior partner at SJ Berwin, says: “Nick Anstee sums up everything good about the City — its creativity, its energy and its ability to adapt to fast changing times.” He adds: “He has an exceptional overview of what the City is all about. Nick will be leading the City through a period of unprecedented challenges.”

Much of the focus during his year in office will be on the threat to the City from EU measures such as the Directive on Alternative Investment Fund Managers, seen as a threat to private equity and hedge funds in London. The corporation is beefing up its office in Brussels as a consequence. “I think we are all realising that it’s something that people have overlooked,” he says.

His chosen charitable cause for the year will be Pitch Perfect, which works with the Cricket Foundation and the London Symphony Orchestra to make involvement in music and sport available to disadvantaged youngsters.

The job of mayor has become much more professional in recent years — including a gruelling world tour of duty to drum up support for the City — and candidates are vetted. This has been at the expense of more ceremonial duties. Mr Anstee was keen to be pictured for this piece in a suit rather than in the robes of office.

“I’ve made it clear to the people at Mansion House that wearing the badge is the exception rather than the rule. I’m not Lord Mayor of Westminster, or Belfast — we have a very different function.” Still, the chain and robes will have to come out, he accepts, “on high days and holidays, state banquets, the Lord Mayor’s Show — it goes with the territory”.

C.V

Born 1958, Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

Education Stamford School, Lincolnshire. Executive Education Programme, INSEAD

1982 Qualified as a chartered accountant with Moore Stephens;

1994 Joined Arthur Andersen;

2002 Transferred to Deloitte & Touche;

2007 SJ Berwin Board member, City of London School for Girls, Sir John Cass Foundation Primary School. Director, London Marathon Ltd; Alderman for Aldersgate

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