Judi Bevan

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.

When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just three — but the throng in the Victoria and Albert Museum included a fair scattering of rival investment bankers. ‘You only have to play golf with Win to know how competitive he is, but he’s always worked well with other bankers,’ said one guest.

Justin King feels underappreciated. Dubbed ‘Tigger’ by his staff shortly after arriving as chief executive of a crisis-ridden J Sainsbury Plc in March 2004, the 45-year-old’s normal bounce is notably absent when we meet at the grocery chain’s Holborn Circus headquarters to discuss his progress in ‘making Sainsbury’s great again’. Sales over the 12-week Christmas trading period were a laudable 5 per cent up on a same-store basis, but he struggles to conceal his irritation with City analysts who, instead of praising this achievement, are already muttering about ‘a profitless recovery’ and the difficulties of improving margins.

Philip Richards is an extreme investor. His willingness to bet against the crowd has turned his initial £150,000 investment in his hedge fund company RAB Capital into £150 million since 1999. In particular, his Special Situations Fund, which he manages personally with the credo ‘to maximise returns with minimal restrictions’, has performed spectacularly. Since he started the fund in January 2003, with a big bet on an obscure Russian gold mine, it has made the handful of investors who were in at the beginning almost 40 times their money. ‘I believe it’s the best performing fund in the world,’ says Richards, an avowed Christian not averse to preaching his own book.

Judi Bevan says that new technology has at last created real liberation for women — by enabling them to run successful businesses from home Kitchen table tycoons — the new buzz phrase to describe women who set up their own businesses from home — now account for £4.4 billion of sales a year, according to Professor Tim Leunig at the London School of Economics. Their numbers are rising rapidly; research by Barclays Bank showed that women started a fifth of all new businesses this year compared with just 13 per cent in 1996. Technology has done for women what Germaine Greer’s rhetoric never could — delivered them genuine autonomy over their own livelihoods.

If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs. He then gathers them round and asks them how it’s going and how they feel. ‘Those visits at half past five in the morning are the most important part of a recovery like this,’ he says firmly. ‘Going to the board meetings is the least important part.

During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint of northern origins. ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do; I still think working in government service is extremely important.’ Now the chairman of the iconic John Lewis Partnership, where the staff owns the company, Hampson retains a strong sense of that early virtue. Tall and clean-cut, with a steely gaze, in another life he would have made a good archbishop.

Charles Dunstone wants Carphone Warehouse to be the Tesco of telephony. ‘You grow your market share, provide the best service at the best price and keep investing the gains you make into the business to make prices even more competitive.’ It is a typical Dunstone statement: simple to say, hard to do. It is no coincidence that his chairman at Carphone is the former Tesco buying director John Gildersleeve, part of the team that helped Tesco overtake Sainsbury’s a decade ago. ‘Charles has a remarkable hunger to do the right thing for customers,’ says Gildersleeve, echoing the Tesco mantra. ‘He has not got a big ego that gets in the way, but he is absolutely obsessive.

A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and was a prominent member of the hell-raising Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Both he and Cameron have classy, team-playing wives and three young children apiece. There, however, the similarity ends. At just 45, Boden is a few years older than Cameron and diffident rather than slick.