It’s 5pm and I’m meeting Michael Spencer for a drink at one of his haunts, the George club in Mayfair. He looks trim and tanned, wears an open-necked shirt and sharp suit and is as charming as ever.

Long gone are the Two Ronnies' style glasses, the brilliant red braces, loud cuff-links and louder suits. That was the City uniform he wore when we first met in the early 1990s, and he was in the process of turning the small voice-broker Icap into what is today the world's biggest electronic wholesale brokerage turning over some $1.3 trillion of transactions a day.