Farewell to Bob, the mercenary who seized command of the Barclays regiment

‘My dad once said that the only time he’d ever heard me say “never” was when I was asked if I’d had enough,’ Bob Diamond told me in 2009. You might guess, given the nine-digit fortune he scooped from Barclays during a 16-year tenure which ended on Tuesday morning, that what he could never get enough of was cash in his own deposit account. But actually he was talking about the pressure of steering Barclays through market storms in the face of relentless personalised hostility: ‘I love the challenge, Martin, I love the business.’

I believed him and, as I’ve written before, I admired him for it. Diamond was the most formidable trading-floor chief of his generation in London. From unpromising beginnings he built a hugely successful investment bank in Barclays Capital and never let it run out of control. He pulled off the deal of the decade at the middle of the banking crisis by picking up the best bits of Lehman Brothers for next to nothing.