Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my contemporaries there (I coincided with him in Barclays for a decade) ever mentioned him as a man to watch before he was picked to follow Bob Diamond. His ‘strategic review’ is full of hot-button stuff about ‘values’, but what struck me about his interview on the Today programme on Tuesday morning was that in his carefully scripted answer to a question about breaking away from the Diamond legacy, he referred to ‘improving returns and dividends to shareholders’ before he recited his mantra about caring for customers and ‘delivering for broader society’.
Evan Davis tried to suggest conflict between those aspirations, but Jenkins rightly corrected him: it really doesn’t have to be that way.
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