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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 ....