Barclays’ surprise choice for chairman: Old Father Time with his lyre

I’ve had a picture on my wall of the newly appointed Barclays chairman, Sir David Walker, for about 25 years. If that sounds creepy, I should explain that it’s a photograph of a 1986 meeting of the Court of the Bank of England, of which my father was a member. Walker, then an up-and-coming forty-something, was an executive director of the Bank and chairman of Johnson Matthey Bankers, which the Bank had bailed out two years earlier to avert a domino collapse across the City. Tall and bespectacled — taking his glasses off for photographers these days seems to me a mistake, giving him the mildly befuddled look of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army — he was the sort of safe-pair-of-hands technocrat who was never quite Governor material but would go on to collect a huge list of senior financial assignments elsewhere.

The last time I bumped into him in the flesh was in October 2008 at a party in the Wallace Collection given by Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank to which he was ‘senior adviser’ either side of a short stint as executive chairman of the London arm.