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There are some people I'd fancy my chances at poker with. Richard Bowker isn't one of them. The boss of National Express is in the midst of a crisis but he doesn't show it.
He runs the company that operates the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh. In December 2007, he agreed to pay the Government £1.4 billion to run the trains on the line until 2015. That figure was based on a forecast of growth in passenger revenues of 9%-10%. Now, Bowker admits, they rose by only 0.3% in the last financial year.
Today, he wants the contract rewritten. But the Government, in the shape of rail minister Lord Adonis, is in no mood to renegotiate - not least because to do so could set a precedent for concessions to the other train operators. So it's a giant, £1 billion-plus crisis.
Yet Bowker appears cool and unmoved. If it was me, I'd be blubbing and shaking uncontrollably. But he's also well-schooled in the art of communication. He is someone, after all, who was hand-picked by Sir Richard Branson and became group commercial director of Virgin Group and co-chairman of Virgin Rail.
He's got the easygoing "call me Richard" manner of his former boss (Bowker is very much in the new breed of industry captain - definitely not a buttoned-up Fat Controller). He also shares that same disarming, Bransonesque way of talking, of being friendly without giving away too much.
There is, though, a steeliness in him - again, not unlike Branson. On the East Coast Line, he says: "It was a very competitive market - the most competitive in the world. Things looked and felt very differently then. We used the same bid strategy as we did on other franchises: we lost two and won one, the East Coast."
He adds: "The Department of Transport accepted these bids, believing them to be good. Now we're having a dialogue with the Government, there's a new economic reality."
And that reality leads to the possibility that National Express may walk away completely, that it could hand back the service. If it did, Adonis could implement a "cross-default" clause that would deny Bowker's company its two other franchises: the commuter lines, National Express East Anglia and c2c from London to Essex.
National Express, says Bowker, is prepared to do its bit. "There's got to be cost-management, self-help - we're looking at a number of things which will reduce our costs." And he may have to make a rights issue, to try to bring down the company's £1.2 billion debts - something he won't discuss but doesn't deny.
Branson, who runs the West Coast Line, and the rival franchisees, have not been slow to wade in. The Virgin chief has called for there to be no "deals behind closed doors" between National Express and ministers. Bowker is equally quick to hit back at his ex-employer. "Richard is saying that franchises entered into should not be changed, is he? It's funny how the biggest renegotiation on a franchise to date was with Virgin four or five years ago on Cross Country [then owned by Virgin].
"It's just as well it did, because if Richard had the same view then as he is espousing now, the Cross Country franchise would have vanished and the loss would have cross-defaulted to Virgin."
You suspect the problem that Branson and the rest - the Government, too - face in Bowker is that for three years, after quitting Virgin, he was the rail czar, he ran the Strategic Rail Authority. He is well-versed in how politicians and mandarins think and behave.
He's adept, for instance, at turning the argument on its head - playing the populist card. Yes, National Express is in difficulty on the East Coast and business has not been good. But we have to ask ourselves what we want from our transport system. It should be viewed as environmentally friendly and as "an enabler to getting us out of recession."
There has, says Bowker, been a "sea change" in Whitehall's attitude towards rail. "A year ago, I was banging on about the need for high-speed trains and couldn't get anyone to engage with me. Now they're being talked about.
"Look at Crossrail, which is now being built - it's evidence of a renewed interest in transport. As a country, we need to look at the expense of rail more as an investment, not as a cost. That's where the French are so different - we must think about the benefits to the economy more than the downside."
Bowker speaks with persuasive zeal, and it's easy to see how at the rail authority he was seen within the industry as being from the new, Blairite mould of public administrator. Indeed, when he landed the SRA post, he was Britain's youngest regulator, aged 35.
He grew up in Lancashire, near Blackburn, went to Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School in the town and still supports Rovers. Today he lives with his wife and children in Staffordshire, near enough to the company head office in Birmingham and not too far away from Blackburn.
Yes, he was a trainspotter in his youth and he has a train set at home ("it's still in boxes, waiting for my 4½-year-old son"). He's also passionate about our canals network, owns a 55ft narrow boat and sits on the British Waterways Board. But it's not all slow boats - he likes to roar around in a Porsche convertible.
He read economics and economic social history at Leicester University and played keyboards in a Christian rock band. For a while he toyed with turning professional - he spent 18 months working as a session musician, playing with, among others, Cliff Richard (he also played with Tony Blair - they were guests of a mutual friend in France and ended up jamming together). "I got being a musician out of my system. It was an odd life, very erratic - from one week to the next, it was difficult to know what you'd be doing."
His "first proper job" was as a graduate trainee with London Underground, "so I've had 20 years in the transport industry".
He worked in the group responsible for the network's first PFI deals. Then he went private with Babcock & Brown, still working on trains, then came Virgin (he bought the trains for Branson's West Coast franchise) and the SRA.
It was, he admits, a "very strange and worrying time" for the industry. The fallout from the Hatfield crash was followed by Railtrack's difficulties and demise. He's most proud, he says, of having sorted out the problems on the West Coast Line and scrapping the dangerous slam-door commuter trains.
After that came National Express. It's not all rail - the group owns coach services in the UK, US and Spain, and trains account for a third of the profits. But right now it is the East Coast Line that overshadows everything.
Hard to imagine now, but on the day National Express won the franchise, his wife was giving birth to their second child. They were so thrilled that they discussed calling him Waverley, after the Edinburgh station. Young Charlie Bowker at least can give thanks that better sense prevailed.
