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Derek Higgs, whose report on corporate governance warned of the dangers of chief executives becoming chairmen, must be feeling a warm glow. The funny thing is, the feud hasn’t stopped Pickering completely reorganising the £96m turnover business, to some effect.

He has sold a loss-making auto-components business, sold and leased back the firm’s Coventry manufacturing site, paid a chunk of cash back to shareholders, boosted sales of standard taxis beyond London, and is in the process of negotiating deals to produce the cabs in kit form in Thailand, and to manufacture them from scratch in China.

That’s quite a list for a man who has every excuse to be distracted. Melville-Ross says Pickering’s strengths are that he is very focused and very clear about what the strategy should be.

“And when he says something, he does it. And he’s got huge integrity, which makes the current row all the more extraordinary.”

Pickering says he has just had to get on with it. He and many commentators think the company is now in a better position than it has been in for years. Borwick says it is losing money, overvalued and heading for a fall.

Much may now ride on Pickering’s shift of the firm into a new area: cab-hailing technology. It has poured nearly £10m into developing its Zingo service — you ring in on your mobile, it automatically puts you through to the nearest available black cab. Only 900 out of London’s 20,000 cabs have taken up the technology so far, but if cabbies go for it, it could be a big moneyspinner. It is also a big leap for a metal-basher that hasn’t run a service operation before.

Pickering says it is already building nicely by word of mouth, and he has got all the main mobile networks involved. “Open my drawer and you will find I have got four phones lined up,” laughs Pickering. He operates one on each network, so he can check the service is working properly. He likes that kind of order. His big passion outside work, he says, is collecting CDs. He has thousands and, yes, he has them all racked up in alphabetical order. “You’ve seen the guy with the record collection in High Fidelity? That’s me.”

This attention to detail runs, you suspect, in his genes. His father was a payroll clerk in the steel industry, his mother a book-keeper. Born and brought up in Hartlepool, Pickering was — unsurprisingly, perhaps — a maths boffin who read mathematics at Cambridge before jumping into accountancy. He had watched his father have to switch careers when shipbuilding shut down in northeast England, and he appreciated the steady income.

He did a stint in the Gulf for Arthur Andersen but eventually decided he wanted to get into industry, and moved into Rockwell. By the time he joined Borwick at Manganese as finance director, he was looking to make the final jump to boss. At that stage Manganese had great prospects, based on the expectation that the government’s disability legislation would force all taxis to be wheelchair- accessible. That legislation was never enacted.

No regrets joining? None, shrugs Pickering. But it’s pretty clear Borwick now wants him out, and not at all obvious what you do when your 37% shareholder takes up that kind of position. Couldn’t they just sort it out face-to-face?

Pickering might. Borwick, who gave 13 years to the company and feels passionately about its future, seems unlikely to. Melville-Ross, who walked into this as Manganese’s senior non-executive when it first blew up, is not sure what will happen next. “Either Jamie gets a bid together and takes us private,” says Melville Ross, “or he sells up and invests in something else he can help to run.”

Borwick says his family has held the Manganese shares for 40-odd years, “and I expect we will be holding on to them for another 40, too.” Impasse. A third option is that Pickering might decide he has had enough, and chuck it in. That, for the moment, looks unlikely, as so much could go right for the firm.

On Thursday, Schroders, another of Manganese’s big investors, bought a further 180,000 shares just as the row was hitting the headlines. That takes its stake to 12.8%.

Is this the cavalry coming to the rescue? Or astute positioning for later profit-taking? It’s too early to tell. Pickering just wants to get on with running the firm. The question is, will he be allowed to?