She herself came for the fun of it, the toxic cocktail of cash, sex and glamour, swayed by the tales of the rarified lives of bankers’ wives, the thought that anything is possible — including “bagging a trader”. In this, the competition is fierce. “I like a rich man,” says one office worker who came to the City straight out of school, at one of the Square Mile’s more forlorn joints. She sighs: “Mind you, I’ve been trying for 19 years — ain’t got nowhere.” She tells me to go to Revolution, a vodka bar that’s also teetering distance from the Bank of England and “stuffed with traders and women trying to get traders on freshwater pearl earrings a Thursday. It’s absolutely filthy”.

She’s right: by 8pm the place is heaving with stripes and competitive haircuts — and, my God, is that an actual pair of red braces? A reformed computer nerd in a loud checked shirt break-dances for his friends, who copy him like robotic Teletubbies. The boys drink girls’ pink drinks — cocktails, champagne and vodka cranberry. They are awkward, sweet types with cannon-fodder faces: the boys who didn’t get the girls at school. Now they’ve got them coming out of their ears — babes standing around in threes and fours, their dolls’ hairdos loaded with Topshop accessories. Within minutes a man taps me on the shoulder with the corner of a platinum Amex and asks me what I’m having. “I’m married,” is his hysterical chat-up line. I think about asking him for a bottle of champagne with a sparkler in it, but instead I ask him what the girls in the office make of him. “They’re frightened, frightened,” interjects one of his friends.

Downstairs, murals depict women naked to the waist and reaping corn in what looks like Essex. A Kelly Brook lookalike in a highly flammable outfit pulls a man by his tie along the length of the bar. I approach three girls who work in the City. They tell me that they are just here for an “after-work bevvy”, but they’re all single and wish pearl oyster dressed to the nines, and well, do you know, they have just been discussing whether they would date one of these men.

“Some guys came up to us earlier,” says one. “They’re so full of it.” But does she like it? “Well, I guess it’s fun.” She’s had a few boyfriends who were traders, brokers, but she looks down on women who sleep around to get ahead. “A lot of women in the City sleep their way to the top, boyfriend after boyfriend. Women with brains don’t necessarily get anywhere.”

They are resigned to the fact that women earn less. “You can’t do anything about it, can you?” One was once paid her Christmas bonus in £25 Spearmint Rhino strip-club tokens. “It didn’t bother me at all. You shouldn’t be working in the City if you don’t like stuff like that.” In fact, she seems proud of the stereotype. Office banter is “lewd, crude, loud and lairy — and if you are too, you’ll be fine. They’ll talk rugby, football. Women. You’ll be in a bar with lots of attractive women and they’ll be like, ‘There’s no one in the office like that.’ You just give it straight back. If he pinches me on the bottom, then I’ll pinch him on the bollocks…That’s the way it is. It’s a bear pit. The City is not a place for women who are easily shocked.”

Of course she’s been to lap-dancing twisted pearl necklace clubs. “If you’re an investment banker, you have to do what the clients want,” she says. She wasn’t impressed. “But I was like, ‘Did you see some of the girls there? I’m better than they are.’ ” Still, they don’t see themselves hanging around for ever. In another 10 years, they’ll be out of the Square Mile.

“It’s not for families,” they shrug. “You have a baby, you have to leave.” Not for them the fate of the women I spied earlier in the evening at the top of the Coq d’Argent: two senior women, looking stiff and thin in their bouclé jackets, sipping gin together. “Nah,” they say.

Still, Morrissey has decided to speak to me because she believes that City women need to push for equality. “I feel I need to get out and say these things… It’s a great shame [that women won’t talk]. I guess the press attention given to high-profile women has backfired — but we’ve still got to make an effort. Women need to inflatable castles feel that they can speak up. I’m on a bit more of a mission because better decisions are made in business if a woman’s perspective is involved. We’re wasting a lot of talent if we don’t have women continuing to make strides.”

As a chief executive, Morrissey is a rarity: a mere 11.7% of FTSE 100 company directors are women, and she has hardly had it easy. After gaining an MA in philosophy at Cambridge, she had her first child at 25 — she’s now 43 — but, she says: “It was quite difficult getting organised with our first.” She didn’t plan to have nine children: “We initially thought we’d have five,” she says, as if this is also perfectly reasonable. “Six was a happy accident, seven was conscious…” and then oops, you’re up to nine. Could happen to anyone, I say.

She took five months off fo pearl jewellry the first baby, but by the last two her maternity leave had gone down to six weeks, during which time she BlackBerried. “Although I was focused on the babies and stuff,” she says. “I didn’t feel at all conflicted. A lot of women are worried they will be judged as working mothers. But you’ve got to be true to your instincts.” Around the fourth birth, she and her husband decided that he would give up his job as a financial journalist to run the household with the help of a nanny. She now has six girls and three boys, aged from seven and a half months to nearly 18.

“Children do benefit from having one parent around, however great the nanny,” she says. She agrees that there is no way her situation could work if her husband didn’t stay at home, and she confesses that she feels guilty if she has to be away too much. “Small children want their mother a lot. When I was in New York last week it was very hard on the baby and my husband. You come back and they’re all a little fragile for a few days. Then they settle down and I say I’m not going away for a little while.” Familial emotions are “a fact of life” she says. “You can’t have everybody all clinical. Children have feelings and pearl earri ngs emotions. It’s not all perfect all the time.”

So, can you have it all? “There’s not a silver bullet… a magic answer,” she says. She has built her situation out of discipline and “repeated ordinary behaviour”. Yes, she finds that the City is rife with chauvinism. “There’s no intention to be chauvinistic, but there is a clubby feel that you are outside of. Because you are. To be perfectly honest, very often you’re the only woman, and, just sometimes, it bothers me.”

She feels lucky not to work at a company that is overtly macho, where there is pressure to mix socially after hours. “With some firms you’ve got to go out. Others don’t necessarily have the same macho approach. I have one night out a week —sometimes two.” The nature of her job helps, too: “Fund management is more to do with quality of ideas than hours at a desk. Obviously, a corporate lawyer doesn’t have that luxury. I don’t see how I could do a job with timely deals.”

Because timely deals, for pearl necklace anyone, mean no private life. Amanda Staveley, a creamy blonde from Doncaster, is in some ways the polar opposite of Morrissey: she gave up her personal life years ago. She runs her own private-equity firm and is based in Abu Dhabi. Last year she netted a rumoured £40m commission for a deal she brokered with Barclays. She has also been romantically linked to Prince Andrew, but in her line of work, relationships are hardly a priority.

“I’m 35, I don’t have children, I work 20 hours a day,” she says. “I couldn’t have a family or a husband when I am charging around the world. I don’t think you can work that much and be a great mother. I’ve been a terrible partner: speak to some of my ex-boyfriends. Sometimes I feel left out because I haven’t had children. It’s unfair, but that’s life. I couldn’t have a child, because it would be unfair on my shareholders and my staff. I’d love to but it’s not possible. You can’t have your cake and eat it. I could not have earned what I am earning at the moment if I hadn’t been available at all times.”

She has got where she is because she is “far tougher than a man”. She has never experienced any kind of discrimination but is so driven that I am not sure she would actually notice it. She concedes that being a woman can mean you get noticed, and that men are pleasantly surprised when “you’re relatively switched on”. Still, she adds: “Women have to understand that yes, you must deliver, and sometimes you must be even better.” She expects the same from her employees. “I’m a bitch to work for. But I wouldn’t hesitate to hire a woman of child-bearing age. I’ve got one PA who’s been with me 16 years, and I feel responsible she’s not had kids.” But while she recognises the stark choice she has made, she adds: “I disapprove of women abusing the system. I had a company that owned a health club. They were interviewing a gym manager and she knew that she was pregnant. Three months later she was not in the job. We paid a full year of maternity leave and she had no intention of coming back. In the City they don’t abuse the system in that way. If a woman wants to go into this world she’s got to know that she wants to do it.”

Superficially, these two women may be different, but really they are cut from the same cloth: driven, determined, expert strategists. In fact, apart from the beautiful wrapping, they could easily be men. They’re not mouse-women, precisely, but they have certainly made sacrifices. I’m not sure that they are brilliant advertisements. I’m not sure that the voiceless twenty- and thirtysomethings who cultured pearl jewelry pound Bank, Monument and St Paul’s, morning, noon and night are really signing up for 20-hour days and house-husbands and no time with the kids. I’ll certainly bet they don’t want to become that woman who, I’m told by a hairdresser, is too busy to wash her own hair, and when she does, once a week, “it takes a half-hour shampoo”.

So I start to wonder why women would go into the City at all at a time like this. But go they do. Last year, the Higher Education Careers Services Unit reported that 30% of 2006 graduates going into investment banking were women. Money is still a draw, of course, for the next generation of Staveleys and Morrisseys, the so-called “graduate princesses” on the bank’s fast-track programme. Instantly recognisable from their teamed Zara outfits and expensive sunglasses, some of them are foreign, mostly Swiss or French. “They’re treated differently, and they know they’re different,” snips a talkative Australian in a lap-dancer’s approximation of a pinstripe suit who works “in risk”, over wine in a bar that’s a coin’s flip from the Bank of England. “One is the girlfriend of our head trainer. She got promoted and promoted and we all knew why.”

Clare the PR is baffled. “Sorry, what do you want to talk to her about?” Bonuses, I say. Because I read a report that said women in the City were getting 80% less than men in performance-related pay and I thought that Katherine Garrett-Cox, CEO of the cultured freshwater pearl investment company Alliance Trust, might have something interesting to say about it. They don’t call her Katherine the Great for nothing.

“Well,” says Clare, then pauses. “She’s been doing a lot of press for the deal but… She’s trying to move away from the female chief executive thing. She thinks it’s great that she is where she is, but she would hate to think that’s anything to do with her as a woman.” Really? How depressing. “She would like to think that it’s something more to do with her being a business… person.” She pauses. “I can hear you typing. You’re not going to quote me, are you?”

Well, I am going to twisted pearl necklace quote her but only because I can’t find anyone else to quote. Everywhere I call, the answer is the same. Katherine Garrett-Cox: no. Clara Furse, former chief executive of the Stock Exchange: no. Nicola Horlick, CEO of Bramdean Asset Management: no — although I am told by a rival alpha female that this is possibly because “Nicola doesn’t have many fans. Saying you can have it all when you can’t: she’s done us all a disservice. You can’t be me-me-me. You’ve got to be more us-ish”.

So the top girls won’t talk because they’re frightened or in-fighting, and neither will the young female hedge-fund managers, the senior bank executives or women traders. They won’t discuss the still-shocking pay gap, the cut-throat recruitment policies — “any hint of ‘Mummy’ or ‘part-time’…forget it,” said one, off the record — or the lingering stain of sexual harassment. In fact, it’s almost comical.

“I can’t talk now,” whispers one American brunette who, judging by her picture, is as much Park Avenue Princess as hedge-fund supremo and self-avowed leader of women in business. “But if you call me on the mobile after 6.30pm…” Another, a female metals trader — female traders, especially metals traders, are as rare as hens’ teeth — shifted between a low voice and shouting “Four hundred? Do we have 400?” She doesn’t want her name anywhere near this piece, but she admits that the “trading ratio is still pathetic, still the old boys’ network. The guys mentor the guys. Yes, you’ve got women on the board. But they are token. You have to harden up to survive. It’s a bloody struggle”.

Even the PAs — sorry, “liaison officers” — are seemingly tongue-tied. An Angela Rippon lookalike outside the freshwater pearl pendant Bank branch of Starbucks, seamless and immaculate in a teal silk suit and a face full of beauty-counter make-up, carrying four fat-cat lattes back to her big international bank, looks terrified when I tell her I’m press. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I can’t talk to you. Not even off the record. They don’t like it.”

So. Forget the glass ceiling. This is a glass bell jar. The public face of women in the City today is the odd heavily PR’d ice woman or Mihaela Popa, the 31-year-old Romanian accountant who recently tried to sue PricewaterhouseCoopers for £40m for “making her feel like a prostitute”. No heroine of her gender, she. She had previously lost tribunal claims against the company for race discrimination, unfair and wrongful dismissal, came across as deluded and money-grubbing, and was awarded a mere £750.

No: the thrilling phalanx of boardroom babes who broke balls with one hand and breastfed with the other is largely a thing of the past. In the face of greater concerns — the recession, for example, which, says one PA, has left the men “too tired even to harass” — the fight for equality has largely stagnated. The freshwater pearl necklace sisterhood is broken.

What remains is a nest of frightened mouse-women who negotiate their lives and careers as unobtrusively as possible. As one female broker put it: “If you see a colleague having her knickers cut off next door to you, you just carry on working.” Both of you, that is. Because it’s just not worth sticking your head above the parapet.

An eye-opening report by Financial News recently revealed that, of the 1,100 City women who they spoke to, 43% had experienced sexual discrimination, 63% felt that their gender made it more difficult for them to succeed, 45% believed that cases such as Mihaela Popa’s hindered their cause, 71% did not have children, and 60% maintained that it was not possible to combine a high-octane job and family life. Now a kind of defeatism pervades. A shrug, a feeling that it’s just the way things are. Will any of these mouse-women roar?

Eventually, I do find an apparently sane inflatable tent woman who will be heard, though I am not sure that “apparently sane” can apply to someone who has run a huge fund for eight years and has nine children. As the CEO of Newton Asset Management, Helena Morrissey is undeniably some kind of a poster girl for having it all. Still, even she  pulls a face when I mention the word “superwoman”. “It implies you’re doing something out of the ordinary,” she says.

Well, Morrissey is out of the ordinary — as she sweeps into a boardroom high above Blackfriars in a beautiful forest-green dress and tasteful jewels, she is more Anna Wintour than Angela Merkel. She can’t weigh more than 7st for starters. “People are surprised about the weight. My husband says I’m just made like that.”

Throughout the 20th century, an abundant supply of low-cost energy was the driving force behind the spread of global prosperity and development. Today, satisfying ever-growing energy demand in a sustainable way has become the world’s biggest challenge.

According to BP’s projections, we will need about 45 per cent more energy in 2030 than we consume today. That will require industry to invest some $25 to $30 trillion — more than turquoise jewelry $1 trillion (£600 billion) a year for 20 years.

We need a more diverse energy mix — involving greater use of nuclear power and of renewable sources as well as fossil fuels — to enhance energy security and tackle climate change. But we also have to face a few facts. First, the transition to a lower-carbon economy is a journey that will take decades.

Second, it is not clear right now how we are going to get there. We need a clear road-map for the transition to akoya pearl jewelry a lower-carbon world, with governments and the private sector working together to shape the framework for our future energy mix.

Third, we should take a realistic view of the potential for alternative energy. There is a danger of promising too much, too soon.

You might say that this is what you would expect to hear from the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. But BP is also a significant investor in renewable resources such as wind, solar power and biofuels.

The reality is that the technology, infrastructure and regulatory framework for alternative energies will take decades to be deployed at scale. At present, all of the world’s wind, solar, wave, tide and geothermal power account for only about 1 per cent of total energy consumption. Looking ahead, even the boldest forecasts say they will meet less than 10 per cent of demand in 2030.

The sheer scale of the energy industry makes a rapid transition inconceivable. It takes 30 years, for example, to turn over the capital stock in the power generation sector and 15 years in cars. That is why it is so important to establish and start implementing a road-map for the transition now, based on an freshwater pearl necklace understanding of the existing infrastructure, changing technology and economic incentives.

It is all about smart choices — about ensuring that the money we invest is spent to best effect. In many cases, such choices can be made on the basis of what we know now, rather than technologies still in development. And the smartest and most effective choice we can all make is to use energy far more efficiently.

Take transport, responsible for 25 per cent of UK CO2 emissions. By far the most effective path to a lower- carbon road transport industry lies in making internal combustion engines more efficient. Smaller, more efficient petrol and diesel engines, combined with increasing use of hybrid technologies, will produce significant carbon savings in the next two decades.

Increasing use of biofuels will help. By extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as they grow, some biofuels can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent compared with conventional petrol, according to recent studies. At BP we believe that biofuels could provide more than 10 per cent of global road transport fuel by 2030. To put this into perspective, the combination of advanced hybrid cars and quality biofuels offers comparable CO2 savings to running battery-powered electric cars from the existing UK electricity cheap pearl jewelry grid — but at less than half of the additional cost.

Smart choices are also available in power generation, responsible for another 30 per cent of UK carbon emissions. Under EU regulations, a third of the UK’s coal-fired stations are due to be retired before 2016. A number of options present themselves to fill the gap: nuclear power, offshore wind, natural gas and clean coal.

In my view we will need all of them. But nuclear expansion still faces significant uncertainties. Offshore wind is extremely costly. As for new-build coal, to meet carbon targets it would need to be fitted with carbon capture and storage — a technology that, while showing promise, still faces challenges that will take time to resolve. Commercial plants are unlikely before 2020.

That leaves gas, the cleanest fossil fuel with less than half the carbon emissions of coal. It is abundantly available to the UK. Indigenous gas provides 73 per cent of UK consumption today and could still make up as much as 30 per cent in 2020. Gas is also widely available from non-UK suppliers, ranging from Norway to North Africa, as well as from the global market for liquefied natural gas. Any concerns about security of supply can be addressed by diversifying suppliers and building more storage capacity.

Gas is also a necessary complement for renewable sources, given that gas-fired generators — unlike nuclear and coal-fired plants — can be readily switched on and off to back up intermittent wind and solar power.

These are just some of the factors that need to be considered in drawing up an energy road-map for the UK. However, change on the scale envisaged will only happen if freshwater pearl earrings governments create the framework.

Industry needs stable and enduring conditions to invest, and in the case of energy that means a transparent and uniform price for carbon.

The EU has made a start with its Emissions Trading Scheme, but we are a long way from an effective, global carbon pricing regime. Until energy producers and consumers know and pay the real price of carbon, the climate for investing in a low-carbon economy will remain uncertain in the extreme. We will also need additional incentives and policies to drive technological innovation and behavioural change.

In the UK, a debate is under way about what more the Government needs to do to meet its commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Like others, I worry that the liberalised energy market on its own will not deliver the sustainable and diverse supply mix we need.

History tells us that real change in energy markets can only occur when public policy and private enterprise work hand in hand. Government needs to play an active role in drawing up a road-map for our energy future. Industry can then move forward with confidence to invest in a secure and sustainable energy supply. I don’t believe we can afford to wait.

The Pakistani Government and Army have finally decided to heed the words of a former ruler: “No patchwork scheme — and all our recent schemes, blockades, allowances etc are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end will here be inflatable water games peace.”

Did Pervez Musharraf, the former President, say that? No, it was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, more than 100 years ago. And for both strategic and humanitarian reasons Curzon added: “I do not want to be the person to start the machine.”

The inhabitants of Waziristan have resisted outside conquest since time immemorial. That is why Pakistan continued the British tradition of indirect rule, and kept only minimal forces in the region.

So crushing the local Taleban and establishing Pakistani authority in South Waziristan is going to be a long, bloody business in the face of bitter opposition backed by much of the local population — a population motivated as much by old tribal traditions of resistance as by support for the Taleban. This operation will cause great suffering to civilians and lead to deep unhappiness among many Pashtun troops in the Pakistani Army. That is why, like Curzon’s government of akoya pearl earrings India, Pakistan has hesitated for so long before “starting the machine”.

The last time it did so on a large scale under US pressure in 2004-05, it suffered humiliating reverses and was forced to make a series of peace deals.

The Pakistani authorities have now decided to act again, in part because of pressure from the US, and from a desire to be seen to do something effective against the Pakistani Taleban to persuade Washington to release the billions of dollars in aid envisaged in the Kerry-Lugar Bill. Above all, however, they have decided to act because they have come to see the Pakistani Taleban as a serious threat to them.

The decisive moment came in April, when after a peace deal that conceded the Taleban demand for Sharia law in Swat, the Taleban immediately moved into the neighbouring district of Buner, barely 60 miles from Islamabad, and threatened the Pakistani state itself. Equally importantly, for the first time the Taleban’s breach of the agreement and open aggression convinced many ordinary Pakistanis to support military operations against the militants. The Taleban had also begun large-scale terrorist attacks outside Pashtun areas. As cultured pearl jewelry a result, the Pakistani army in June launched a ruthless counter-offensive against the Taleban in Swat, which cleared them from the valley.

Three questions hang over the operation in South Waziristan: Will it succeed? Will it help the Western effort in Afghanistan? And will it reduce terrorism in Pakistan, which has surged in recent weeks in response to the military’s actions?

If the Pakistani armed forces put forth their full strength, they can gain control of Waziristan in the sense of breaking up open Taleban armed groups. This will not end the insurgency, but it will drive the local Taleban underground or across the border into Afghanistan.

Will it help the fight against the Taleban in Afghanistan? Only to a limited extent and indirectly. No doubt some Pakistani militants who would otherwise have gone to fight there will be killed; but the Afghan Taleban, while linked to the Pakistani Taleban, are akoya pearl beads also separate from it, with their own bases of support in both countries. These include Jalaluddin Haqqani and his clan based in North Waziristan, and the leadership of the Taleban in the “Quetta Shura” in northern Baluchistan. These groups have not attacked Pakistan, and their leader, Mullah Omar, has repeatedly called on his allies to stop attacking Pakistan and concentrate on the Western forces in Afghanistan.

To have a major impact on the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani Army would have to attack the Afghan Taleban on Pakistani soil. This is what the US will expect Pakistan to do next — but Washington is likely to be disappointed.

Not only are these old Pakistani allies, and the only allies Pakistan has in the unfolding Afghan civil war; but most Pakistanis draw a distinction between the increasingly condemned Pakistani Taleban and the Afghan Taleban, who are seen as gravely flawed but fighting for the liberation of their country from enemy occupation. “They can be cruel and extreme, but they have a right to fight for their country, and we should not fight against them,” an old shopkeeper in Peshawar told me in July.

Attacking the Afghan Taleban in northern Baluchistan would also stir up the so far peaceful Pashtun population there and undermine Pakistan’s struggle with ethnic Baluch rebels to the south. Pakistani officials therefore hope that instead they will be able to capture some al-Qaeda leaders in South Waziristan and hand them over to Washington. That would please the US and might reduce the pressure on Pakistan.

Finally, will the offensive reduce terrorism in pearl pendant Pakistan? In the medium term, almost certainly not. While some terrorism has been planned by the Taleban leadership from South Waziristan, there is also evidence of the growing involvement of Sunni extremist groups from Punjab, and especially the sectarian group Lashkar-e-Janghvi.

But terrorism and insurgency are different things. Terrorism can exact a terrible toll, but it cannot destroy a state and may even strengthen it. What would have destroyed Pakistan would have been the extension of Taleban authority from one region to another. The Pakistani military have already proved in Swat that they can prevent this — and they are going to prove it again in South Waziristan.