It has governed the capital’s financial district since 1191, when Prince John, presiding in place of a crusading Richard the Lionheart, gave the locals the right to elect their own sheriff. The City of London selects its lord mayor from more than 100 guilds, such as the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths.
It’s never wise to trifle with tradition in the U.K. Nonetheless, the corporation boldly (if rather belatedly) extended suffrage to all Europeans last year. French-born Clotilde Wang, the 52-year-old head of business-continuity planning at Deutsche Bank, jumped at the chance to run for the corporation’s 100-person ruling council. It didn’t hurt her candidacy that Deutsche employees cast one third of the votes in the City’s Cornhill ward: The victorious Wang becomes the first European to sit on the council in its 800-year history. Last month she assumed her post, which includes an appointment to the corporation’s finance committee.
She came to London from Paris 30 years ago to learn English and ended up marrying a British civil servant and going to work for a French bank. She later switched to Bankers Trust, which was acquired by Deutsche in 1999.
Wang, who has raised funds for children’s charities and tutored teenagers about business careers, has an open-ended agenda: “I’d like to put something back into the community,” she says simply.
