This is an article about a man and his theories, so let's start with a theory about men. It's this. You can change your hairstyle as often as you like, but it will always give away what you looked like at 21. So Tony Blair will always have a bit of the 1970s Oxford rock star wannabe about him. David Cameron: whatever goes on inside his political head, on top of it is a clean-cut child of Thatcher with a touch of Brideshead bouffant. And Jeremy Lang can cut his curly mop any way he likes, but he'll always look like a child of the early 1980s New Wave.

It's not that he has a mullet or one of those Adam Ant-like
strands of hair hanging down the nape of his neck. Still, as
we shake hands, I have the tiniest suspicion that Mr Lang
might just spin away and do a quick Spandau Ballet dandyish
flourish before we sit down to talk business.

Instead - and I swear I don't know how this happened - we get straight on to the subject of early 1980s music and its influence on the later Lang. He was the product of Datchet, an affluent and fairly dull commuter town between romantic Eton and somewhat less romantic Slough. Suburban middle-class males of the period invariably sought refuge in black clothes and blacker theories of life; and Lang was no exception. ªAs a student I was into Joy Division, The Cure, Brecht, existentialism,º he remembers. “It was bleak stuff, nihilistic - life was hopeless.”

So where did bleak nihilism take a bright graduate in 1986? Well, straight to the City. Lang is surprised by my surprise. “It was a relatively easy transition. Think about the City of the 1980s. Pure nihilism. The only value in life was in money”

The stockbroker James Capel in the mid-1980s was a ferociously hard-working, adrenalin-filled house dominated by its charismatic chairman, the late Peter Quinnen. The analysts swaggered, and the salesman swaggered even more on the back of the last hoorah of the home-grown brokerages before the Big Bang and the bigger crash of '87 brought the party to an end.

Lang slipped quietly past the egos into the sphere of fund management head Stephen Lofthouse. Lofthouse established a new quantitative analysis function as an alternative to the personality-driven cult of the analysts. Lang, untrained and unready, was given a desk, a phone and the good faith of his new boss. For the first six months “I just made up things to do,” he says

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