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Lord Levene thumps five great documents down on the coffee table in his office. "I've collected these reports into the City and regulation. There's the Win Bischoff report, Bob Wigley's, David Walker's, the Global Competitiveness study and now George Osborne's."
When you see them all like that, piled up, it's a shock. All that effort, all that earnest endeavour - and all that hot air and those endless cups of coffee and croissants.
Levene, the 67-year-old chairman of Lloyd's of London and former Lord Mayor of London with a Who's Who list of appointments and honours that occupies 21 lines, is as Establishment as they come. But there is a different, non-conformist streak running through him. Lloyd's has 321 years of history behind it and a reputation for formality and stuffiness (the Lloyd's Building may look modern and utilitarian but to reach Levene's eyrie, visitors must negotiate an array of uniformed doorkeepers).
Nevertheless, its chairman drives one of only 100 Smart cars converted to electricity, is passionate about football and in particular, Chelsea, pointedly doesn't play golf and doesn't sail, and always keeps his public speeches to a maximum of just seven minutes.
Since 2002 at Lloyd's, where he was sent in to steer a market still struggling to cope with the fallout from the series of scandals in the 1980s, he has worked a minor miracle. Latterly, with chief executive Richard Ward, Lloyd's has been restored to health so, as Levene puts it, "nobody talks about Lloyd's any more. Twenty years ago, Lloyd's was the one place everyone wanted to talk about. Anyone who worked at Lloyd's wouldn't dare mention it in polite company."
But, says Levene, a survey this April showed that "everyone is delighted and proud to work here". He is quick to stress that the transformation was "on its way before I got here". Lloyd's, he explains, "is a market, not a business." For change to occur, all the members had to agree - or leave. A new franchise performance group was installed, so that underperforming syndicates were turfed out.
The vast amount of paperwork that Lloyd's generated was put on to computer. Finally, Equitas, the vehicle set up to cover the pre-1993 long-tail losses of syndicates, was sold to Warren Buffett. The result is a successful, modern Lloyd's, with a rebuilt reputation for efficiency and probity.
Lessons from Lloyd's turnaround, says Levene, can and should be applied to another industry currently experiencing grave crisis - the banks. Which is why he has created the tower of documents before us. He's positively steaming. "Look at this lot. You can get the best organisational chart and have useless people and it will never work. And if you get brilliant people, you don't need the chart - they can make it happen. The issue now is having good regulation and good people."
It's not just Lloyd's where he acquired a name as a troubleshooter. In 1984, Michael Heseltine plucked him out of the armaments business to help him run the Ministry of Defence. "We employed 36,000 people. I took it down to 6000." Then, in 1991, he was asked by Heseltine to sort out Docklands, which was in trouble. Then came the chairmanship of Canary Wharf, which was also appearing fragile. Along the way, too, there have been jobs galore, at quangos, banks and other companies.
He attracted controversy. At the MoD, he was paid £95,000 a year, "more than the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary but 30%-40% less than I was getting in the private sector." And, he says, even allowing for inflation, a pittance compared with the £9.6 million package being awarded to Stephen Hester at Royal Bank of Scotland. "I did it because I believed in doing my bit."
That said, he acknowledges working in the public service was far harder and more fraught than in private business. "In the private sector, you can be right 51% of the time and that is OK, 60% is good, 70% is great and 80% makes you a genius. In the public sector, if you're right 95% of the time you're a national disgrace because everyone is only interested in the 5% you got wrong."
Levene despairs of what he is witnessing at the moment. "Ten years ago, I was Lord Mayor and things were going very well. We'd had a new government which had inherited an economy in sound shape.
"I could travel the world as Lord Mayor and everyone I met thought we were the best, the greatest. Now we're right at the other end. I don't blame the Government for all of it because the problem has been international. But as chairman of Lloyd's, I go abroad and people say 'what's happening to your country?' I am annoyed because our image has been damaged. It will be repaired but it will take time."
The new 50% top rate tax enrages him. "Of course, governments need to raise taxes but this is about bashing the rich, about saying it's all the bankers' fault, about making sure they don't earn any more money. There we are, with financial services as the biggest industry in the country and we go and make it less competitive, less attractive." He adds: "Sure, by all means go and rescue Vauxhall, and save the jobs there but the one industry we're actually good at, we go and bash it on the head because it's unpopular."
It's "too early to say what is really going to happen". His fear is that the reports that have been produced will "go on the shelf and gather dust when what we need is altruistic people to get involved. We need them to sort it out". And if, "at the end of 10 years they make some money from what they've achieved, that is no problem".
Instead, what we're left with is a situation where some banks are behaving as though nothing has occurred and carrying on paying their people vast amounts. "The shareholders in those banks do need to look at what is happening." It can't be right, he says, that the head of a major industrial company employing thousands is paid £2 million a year and their banker collects £5 million. "The old master-servant relationship has gone." He shakes his head. "You can't rationalise it."
As for Lloyd's, "the issue we face is to maintain our discipline, to ensure syndicates don't underwrite business which is not profitable, and to see how we can develop Lloyd's in terms of how it goes about its work, and internationally". He's keen to expand to the US. "Over 40% of our business is in the US, we ought to do a lot more there." And to the Middle East and to Asia, to Singapore and China. "We've made a start in China. But we can wait - after all, it's taken Lloyd's over 300 years to grow a huge business in the US."
Offloading Equitas was a relief. "It was the final act in the clean-up. At last the Names were off the hook. Until then, there was a huge sword of Damocles hanging over Lloyd's."
Levene has come in for personal criticism for sitting on the board of Total, the French oil giant, which has substantial interests in Burma. "If I resign, will it make a difference? No. Total has built schools and hospitals there, and all that will happen is that if it leaves, another operator will pick up the business who won't care about the people there."
Married to Wendy, he lives near Regent's Park and has a 16th-century house in Normandy. They have three children - "in London, Hong Kong and New York", he says cheerfully, which is convenient for his travels to the world's financial centres - and nine grandchildren.
He can't bear the thought of retirement. "My wife says I married her for better or worse but not for lunch." He's smiling now, but he wasn't earlier - there's plenty going on that makes him very cross indeed.
