The gathering of Barclays investors at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster on 23 April was inevitably a strange affair. At one and the same time, the bank has managed both to infuriate its investors and to win their admiration.
The patrician leadership of the bank, headed by the former dealmaker Marcus Agius (married to a Rothschild) and John Varley (who married into one of the Barclays-founding Quaker families), has fought with tooth and claw, as the credit crisis descended on the financial system, to keep HM Treasury off its back. While Lloyds Banking Group (the old Lloyds TSB plus HBOS) and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have allowed themselves to fall under direct rule from UK Financial Investments – the arm of government set up to own shares in the semi-nationalised banks – Barclays chose a different direction. It has been a case of taking money from anyone, at any price, as long as the interference from Labour and Whitehall can be kept at bay.
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