Greg Dyke, the ex-director-general of the BBC, once famously described the Beeb as “hideously­ white”. God knows what he’d make of the City.

I may work in arguably the most culturally and racially diverse metropolis on Earth, but the Square Mile is hardly what you would call ethnically varied.

So, now the US has elected Barack Obama as its chief executive­, I wondered: where are all the black execs­ in the business world? While the political arena has thrown up the likes of Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela and Condoleezza Rice, you’d be hard-pressed to name more than one or two ­prominent black financiers.

Instead, the non-white people you see working in the City tend to be security guards and the guys replacing the paper towels. A couple of my black friends agreed the Square Mile was about as black as a Republican National Convention. But why? It essentially comes down to middle-class white men hiring people in their own image.

Moves are afoot to do something about this. I once read about the Interbank Diversity Forum, which addresses issues­ of racism and sexism (another hot topic in banking). Apparently, there are more than 100 “diversity professionals”­ employed by City institutions, who advise on recruitment and monitor the progress of ethnic-minority employees and women. They’ve got some job but, if they succeed in making the City a more multi-racial environment, there will be all sorts of spin-off benefits.

We would have better music for a start, rockin’ out to Tupac instead of James Blunt. And we would have better dancing – I’m sick of being out on the town with a bunch of clumsy white guys in suits.

Now the most powerful man in politics is set to be a black man, we are one step closer to ­realising Martin Luther King’s dream of a day when people “will not be judged by the colour­ of their skin, but by the content­ of their character”. It’s time to send that message to the world of ­investment banking.