Barclays’ new head gardener

Marcus Agius was strolling round his Hampshire garden last summer when a headhunter rang to inquire if he would consider becoming chairman of Barclays Bank. ‘It took me a nanosecond to say yes,’ says Agius. ‘Barclays is a great brand and I love great brands; it’s 300 years old; it’s huge and it’s going through a period of enormous change.’ He took up the job in January after more than three decades as an investment banker at Lazard Brothers.

We are taking tea in his vast corner office on the 31st floor of Barclays’ tower in Canary Wharf. Despite his enthusiasm, Agius is well aware that Britain’s third-largest bank is at the centre of a storm about banks making huge profits from credit-card charges and penalty fees on unauthorised overdrafts. Outraged customers (of all the high-street banks, not just Barclays) were complaining to the Financial Ombudsman at the rate of 5,000 a day last week, and one tabloid greeted Barclays’ full-year profits of £7.1