This is written with great sadness at the very dining room table in Shropshire where my dear old friend, the brilliant raconteur, would-be politician and City financier Patrick Paines would so often be the very last person left sitting, often until 3am. Patrick was an usher at my 2003 wedding, and regular house guest for twenty years. He is the first of my truly close friends to die – stoically on November 8th at the age of 53 from a fast spreading cancer. So I’m writing this ‘The Patrick I Knew’ obit with a tragic sense of resigned irony in the fact that a man with 1950’s matinee idol looks who was so popular and loved – a star of his Cambridge generation and the post Big Bang City - will be denied the chance, due to a second lockdown, for his many friends to say a proper graveside goodbye. He was dubbed ‘The Minister’ due to his command over any room when he was on form. As any visitor to his London mews house downstairs loo will have noticed, Patrick was also ‘Commander Paines’  after being promoted to Clr, Lt in the Royal Naval Reserve. One of his favourite dinner party stories included an account of how he participated in a daring Bond-like rescue mission in a ‘plastic hulled minesweeper’ during the Piper Alpha oil rig explosion of July 6th 1988 whilst serving in his last summer vacation at Cambridge. Whilst his college contemporaries were on work experience for American banks, or inter-railing around Greece, Patrick was involved in a dawn mission to navigate his way through fifty foot flames in the North Sea to pick up floating oil rig workers, dead and alive. He would relate how 167 were killed in the rig disaster, including two crew of another rescue boat in the inferno-like waters. ‘When we were ordered to pull out, due to the black flames, thirty bodies were still not recovered. Our hull was melting in the heat’ he’d say as he lit up again and refilled his glass. Various attractive girls hung on his every word.

The inspiration for his ‘less fizzy’ Indian beer came from boozy dinners in Cambridge curry houses at which Patrick was principal ‘tastemeister’.

One of his closest Cambridge friends was hedgie Jonathan Bailey who now works as a fund manager in California. ‘Patrick was kind, loyal, quick witted and an eloquent speaker. This may explain why he was a regular choice as best man, even to people he hardly knew’.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1989, Patrick worked until 1997 in corporate finance at blue-chip stockbroker Cazenove, followed by stints at NatWest Markets (Africa and mining), Societe General Securities and Cannacord. He also became an investment banking partner at Lakeshore Capital LLP and a partner at Javelin Capital LLP .

As related in Bottled for Business Karan (now Lord) Bilimoria’s 2007 book about the entrepreneurial story behind Cobra Beer, Patrick was also a key founding director and shareholder of Cobra, which started in the late 1980s with just £30,000 of funds. Bilimoria is now President of the Confederation of British Industry. The inspiration for his ‘less fizzy’ Indian beer came from boozy dinners in Cambridge curry houses at which Patrick was principal ‘tastemeister’. As a director, he helped raise the capital and turn Cobra into a global ‘less fizzy’ Indian beer business, now served around the world.

His early death reminds me of how many of my Bonfire of the Vanities banker friends became another Lost Generation. They didn’t die of being blown up in the trenches but their talents and careers often burnt out or shattered in different ways. Many simply embarked on banking careers that – as graduates of History or English Literature - they simply weren’t suited to while others fell victim to unprecedented technological and regulatory change. The world found it didn’t need highly paid fifty year olds in striped suits selling stocks anymore. Patrick was such a case. As Michael Lewis put it in Liar’s Poker, which became a graduate training manual for my contemporaries, he did not regard banking as ‘work’, rather it was ‘more as if I were going to collect lottery winnings’.

Patrick holding court at a Mayfair wedding in 2003

Patrick was a fully paid up member of this generation – although banking was almost certainly the wrong career choice for him. The City was only a means to his true ambition: a career in politics. He could have been a brilliant lawyer, QC, historian, Bishop, or Ambassador - although I suspect he may have ended up as the sort of popular Honorary Consul in the Caribbean who lives for his first G&T before lunch. When abroad – work or holiday – he dressed in a linen jacket, polished brogues and Pitt club tie like a character in a Somerset Maugham novel. His adventures were often the stuff of a novella. His friend Simon Gray remembers a sticky moment when they found themselves, on a mining exploration business trip – with a chauffeur driven black Mercedes outside - drinking Johnny Walker Black label in a downtown bar in Coast Cape on the A...