You can cry wolf once, twice or perhaps even three times. At some point, however, your bluff will be called, and everybody will ignore you. That, tragically, is the City’s fate. The reason I’m sad about this is that I genuinely like the City and its financial institutions; they are a bedrock of the modern British economy.

But warnings such as those by JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon that large numbers of staff will move to the eurozone if we were to leave the EU will fall on deaf ears, and rightly so. We’ve heard this sort of stuff far too frequently in the past, and none of the warnings has ever turned out to be true.

All the banks said that the City would be toast if we kept the pound. Then the euro was launched and activity migrated here in astonishing numbers, finishing off most of continental Europe as a centre for wholesale finance. Not only were the banks wrong, their claims were the very opposite of the truth. It was a spectacularly wrong call from so-called financial experts.

We were also told, repeatedly, that several large banks would quit London as a result of the post credit-crunch regulatory and tax backlash. HSBC spent a long time and a lot of money considering its HQ location, and there was talk that Standard Chartered and even Barclays might leave. Nothing happened – in fact, HSBC’s high-profile decision to stay was the final nail in the coffin of that bank exodus idea.