THE famously ambitious Lord Young of Graffham, former Tory cabinet minister, FTSE 100 chairman and a man Alan Clark MP once equated to an upmarket car salesman, likes to catch people on the hop. In and out of property development, pledging himself to politics, then big business. What is he doing now, floating a high-tech start-up in his seventies?

“The thing is, I’ve always been a serial entrepreneur,” says Young, rather enjoying everyone’s surprise. “It’s the ten years in government and five at Cable & Wireless that were out of character.” Then he chuckles, beaming from behind his rather nice, mahogany-effect desk, complete with flat, mahogany-trimmed computer screen and hidden keyboard. “Actually,” he adds, noticing my admiration of the desk, “it’s from another firm I invested in.”

It deals in repro antiques with all the electrical gubbins stashed neatly inside — very useful for the classier end of the office furniture market.

But back to work. David Young made his first fortune building motorway business parks in the 1960s and later rose to prominence as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite business adviser, secretary of state for trade and industry and a key architect of privatisation.

Post-politics, he chaired Cable & Wireless, then, as he approached bus-pass age, slipped off to start his own venture-capital business, Young Associates, in 1996.

And it’s through his nous for a good idea that he has now struck gold again. One of his venture-capital investments, Pixology, a digital imaging and printing firm that he chairs, announced a deal on Monday to sell technology to Canon. This will provide the camera maker with software to eliminate “red-eye” in flash photography. It already has a similar deal in place with Nikon.

Too niche for you? Just think how many compact digital cameras are being sold round the world, and how many picture phones are soon to follow suit, all with the camera lens too close to the flash — the cause of red-eye. Then think about a share of revenue on items sold.

Pixology, currently making losses but not for long, also heads the field in ‘connectivity’ software used to print out digital pictures. In the week when Kodak confirmed it was to stop selling film cameras, that’s another growth market which may provide even more profit.

So small wonder Young, trim and chipper in blue pinstripe suit and trademark bow tie, is chuckling. And all at an age, 71, when most City bigwigs are putting their feet up at their clubs.

That’s not the only surprise. For a man that some used to find wilful (Whitehall civil servants knew him as “Lord Ego”) and who has a track record of — how shall we put this? — occasionally falling out with his own team (Norman Tebbit in the 1987 general election campaign, his chief executive at Cable & Wireless in the mid-1990s) he is not what you expect at all.

Sitting in his fifth-floor office, a converted apartment high above London’s Cavendish Square, Young exudes amiable energy, as well as a rather disconcerting enthusiasm for complex technology.

Before we’ve even started, he’s grilling the photographer about equipment. Then he’s being good-naturedly snooty about my tape recorder. “Still using tape, eh?” Clearly his renewed business success, and his recovery from cancer of the larynx two years ago, has put the zip back into his demeanour.