ES News email The latest headlines in your inbox twice a day Monday - Friday plus breaking news updates Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive lunchtime headlines Monday - Friday plus breaking news alerts, by email Update newsletter preferences

The City of London’s cherished status as a world financial centre would be placed in jeopardy at a cost of thousands of jobs if Britain quit the European Union, one of its most senior figures warned today.

Gerry Grimstone, chairman of £8 billion savings and investments giant Standard Life, said it was “poppycock” to believe that the Square Mile could survive “Brexit” in its current form.

Mr Grimstone, 63, said he was “neither a Eurosceptic nor a Europhile” but was only concerned with the economic arguments ahead of the referendum on membership promised by David Cameron for after the next election.

He said: “We have this enormous collection of talent in London that puts us right at the centre of global financial business. It is the interconnections of that talent that make the City what it is.

“It we give up membership of this single market of 500 million people some of that talent will start to leave and as soon as that happens you lose those interconnections. That risk of fragmentation is very dangerous. The City would survive but it would be a lot smaller.”

Mr Grimstone, who also leads CityUK, the body which champions Britain’s financial services sector, said that the implications for an isolated Britain in a globalised economy increasingly dominated by Asia were dire.

“If you go to an office in China and look at a map you see China at the centre and the UK is a tiny island in the far left hand corner. If it no longer holds the financial capital of this market of 500 million people they are going to start looking at it very differently.

“They and other countries like India and Brazil would be amazed at the thought that we might not be members of the European Union. I can confidently say that jobs would leave not just the City but the UK.”

The UK enjoys a £16.6 billion trade surplus in financial services with the EU and is the centre for twice as much euro foreign exchange trade as the rest of Europe’s financial centres put together.

Rather than quitting the EU, Britain should focus on helping to strengthen the eurozone and the single market while playing a leading role in reforming the political institutions of the EU, said Mr Grimstone.