³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Senior bankers - those at the very top of our major financial institutions - are traditionally souls of discretion.

They do not make a habit of speaking out. They tend to shy away from controversy. Any criticism is murmured softly, if it is given voice at all.

Sir Nigel Rudd is not your typical senior banker.

Yes, he enjoys the title of deputy chairman at Barclays. He helps run one of our biggest banks.

But he is a man rooted deep in manufacturing and industry.

He is also used to speaking his mind.

Yet on Thursday's Working Lunch is still surprising, both for its bluntness and for the fact that he said it at all.

He described bank bosses who led their companies to the brink of collapse as "lunatics". And he called their business practices "ridiculous".

As I noted with some astonishment during the interview itself, this is not the type of language that bankers use - certainly not to describe each other.

But it shouldn't surprise us that he has strong views about the banking crisis that is causing so much pain throughout business.

He's been at the top of British industry for a generation, and is seriously well-connected.

He passed up the prospect of university for a comprehensive training as an accountant. When he qualified, he was the youngest such person ever to do so at the time.

(He did it because he was good at it, and because his mother told him she had never met a poor accountant.)

His first big break came in his early 20s in south Wales, when he took on a struggling property business. He eventually branched out into engineering - and built one of the UK's biggest industrial holding companies, owning businesses as diverse as fire extinguishers and door locks.

He is one of the most prolific deal makers of the last 25 years, buying and (mostly) selling some of our most-famous names.

He built up his industrial group, Williams, with a string of takeovers - then broke it down again by selling the individual businesses off.

He sold the glass company Pilkington to a Japanese firm.

He got the high street chemists Boots into bed with a European rival, then sold off the whole lot.

Today, he either runs, or is a senior director of, the airport company BAA, the Pendragon car showrooms, the industrial firm Invensys and the defence giant BAE.

All of these are companies that are feeling the pinch from the recession and the credit crunch.

His car sales business, Pendragon, faced a particularly tight squeeze when one of its European bankers shut down its credit lines.

That must have been quite a contradiction for a man who is both industrialist and banker at the same time.

Sir Nigel stands down from his Barclays job in just a few weeks.

Perhaps he's feeling demob happy, or freer to speak out than other colleagues.

But friends say he's also frustrated by the credit crisis, and what he sees as the role of bankers and regulators and city analysts in stoking it.

He is said to pin the blame on the bosses of former building societies like Northern Rock and Halifax, who ditched decades of prudent lending for a torrent of easy money, luring customers in with cut-throat deals underpinned by risky funding from the markets.

It's an area Barclays knows. It bought the Woolwich mortgage lender in the mid 1990s, but found it couldn't compete with the bargains on offer from Northern Rock and others. While Sir Nigel was on the board, Barclays decided not to chase that business and saw its share of the mortgage market shrink - to the disapproval of city analysts.

But critics will say that Barclays is not itself without sin.

You and I might think of it as a collection of high street branches, but that retail banking business is dwarfed by its city trading arms - arms with massive investments that have gone sour.

Barclays is still making a profit. It has not needed a bail-out from the British government. It is not reliant on us taxpayers for its survival.

But it needed a multi-billion pound cash injection from investors in the middle east.

And it's looks like it may have to sign up to the Government's scheme to decontaminate toxic assets - in other words, dump some of its dodgier investments into our laps.

So we may have to support Barclays after all.

Will that be "lunatic" or "ridiculous"? From April, that won't be Sir Nigel's problem ....

I've got to hurry you. If you could just be brief. I'm sorry I'll have to stop you there.

We know you just hate those phrases.

I have to confess - I loathe them too.

When an interview's going really well, when we've got a terrific talker, when they're at a fascinating part of the story -- it's just maddening and frustrating to choke them off in full flow.

So as a rule - we don't do it.

Working Lunch has the most precious luxury in television news - time. 1740 seconds of it every edition. So we've got a bit of wiggle room.

When our guests are being particularly brilliant and sparkling - as they often are - we routinely let interviews run longer than first planned.

But it's not a bottomless pit. If one interview gets more time, another item in the programme will have to make do with less. We can't just make our programme longer - or delay your afternoon movie or snooker.

So sometimes even the most outstanding guest has to be brought to a close.

We are very grateful to every guest who accepts our invitation. They help us to help you become better informed about the business world.

We are - in relative terms - quite generous with the amount of time we give to our big guests. In total, they get about 7 minutes per programme - or roughly one-quarter of our scheduled time.

And the most important point of these interviews is the answer. Unless there's a good reason to cut in, we let guests finish their points before asking the next question. We listen and respond to their answer.

I would never think that our questions are more important, or even as important. The questions are there to draw out the information you need, or guide the guests along their story.

That's why - if you cast your mind back to last November - I didn't interrupt the magazine publisher Felix Dennis when he tore strips off me when I asked him about the Oz pornography trial he was at the heart of in the early 1970s.

He made a robust, passionate defence of the social reforms of that era, and the changes his generation made to our thinking about relationships, equality and class. He gave me quite a tongue-lashing, and many of you thought he made me look like a twit. Good. What I looked like was unimportant. What matters was what he had to say - and while he was being interesting and decent, I wasn't going to stop him.

But there's an unspoken deal in interviews. Our guests have to make good use of that time. That means no waffle, no plugging their products, and no dodging the question.

When guest veer off that path, it's our job to help them back onto it again.

So - to Working Lunch viewers Mike F and Mike A - I'm sorry you were annoyed by our interview with Nokia on Tuesday.

Mike F wrote that he was "upset by the continuous interruptions to your guests, made by Declan Curry, just as they were getting to interesting points.  We believe that he likes the sound of his own voice too much, and will not be watching much longer if this goes on."

Mike A begged Naga to "rein Declan in with his interviewing techniques - he is beginning to interrogate some of your guests as though they were giving evidence at a Treasury Select Committee!"

I'm sorry you both found it uncomfortable viewing.

But I was unhappy with the answers, and felt we were missing an opportunity to talk about innovation and product development - the crucial factors in keeping manufacturing competitive.

I thought I was polite in trying to steer the interview - but had to be firm.

As I knew there would also be viewers like Tim, who emailed a demand to "get that man to answer the question ..."

And I also knew - the clock was ticking.

Oh baby.

She's often controversial - and always out-spoken. So it's hardly a surprise that our guest on Monday, Sylvia Tidy-Harris, caught your attention.

She's a former airline stewardess who took the business version of a mid-air jump - without the parachute. She left her job in the sunny world of holidays and swapped it for the squally seas of enterprise.

For her, the risk paid off. Nowadays she runs a speaking agency that spans three continents.

And like many people who run their own businesses, she's no fan of red tape.

Her pet hate is the batch of regulations that gives new mothers and fathers the right to paid time off work to look after their children.

She sees it as a huge inconvenience and a massive cost. In her view, she loses talented people for a prolonged period and has the hassle of replacing them with someone who may be less skilled.

So to avoid it, she has a contentious solution. She will not hire young women. To avoid any potential prosecution for discrimination, she does not advertise any job vacancies at her company.

This will horrify people who have campaigned over many years for greater rights for parents. To them, work life has to co-exist with family life. If anything, the duty of raising the next generation is much more important than corporate survival. The expense of these measures is just the cost of doing business - a cost that society demands.

Sylvia disputes this, and says many other entrepreneurs agree with her - but dare not say so in public. She claims it's a secret, unspoken truth of small business.

And many of you concur.

"How refreshing to hear someone talking common sense," emailed Rob. "The only people who end up paying for legislation like (this) are the public."

"Ms Harris is absolutely and totally correct," wrote Peter. "These maternity and paternity laws are a farce. No business should have to bear the cost. An employer should be allowed to employ who they want."

John said, "Sylvia's comments on maternity leave and age discrimination were spot on. Well done for airing her views."

But not everyone agreed.

(As I said, she's controversial.)

"This feature gave a very negative message to the business community," wrote Melanie. "Her idea of not recruiting women who may have children is totally unsavoury."

Benn in Hinkley noted, "that young lady needs to enter the real world."

You'll have your own views on this - and feel free to add them in the comments.

I was struck by something else she said. She criticised companies that replaced older workers, accusing them of throwing away skills and experience.

But isn't that what she's doing with younger workers? Isn't she - with her refusal to hire young women - cutting herself off from a vast pool of talent? As well as reducing the country's economic capacity, by removing people who could be productive from the workforce?

And - for all her dislike of red tape - doesn't the behaviour of some companies towards older workers prove the need for regulation to protect them?

Let me know what you think.