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And he’s giving this interview because, uncharacteristically, he wants to make a point about leadership before leaving GKN. He is worried about corporate governance, and in particular the demands being made on chairmen and chief executives now.

Following the Higgs report, he says, the amount of guidance and regulation is growing all the time — GKN’s latest annual report will have six pages devoted to corporate governance, for instance, compared with three in 1999 — but with little evidence that anything is actually being improved.

“You can’t reduce corporate governance to a series of box ticks. You’ve got to believe in it,” he says. “If you think you can have much-improved governance by a whole series of form filling, you are really missing the point.”

He has no objections to the guidance, he continues, but shareholders are going to have to work harder to monitor what is going on. And institutions, in particular, have to show more interest in appointments.

“The important thing here is that institutions need to pay as much attention as they reasonably can to appointments made to the board — particularly chairmen and to some extent chief executives and nonexecutives.”

Is he saying institutional investors are not active enough? “I am saying that they have a very important role in governance, and it is something they should give full consideration to.”

Does he think the demands are making it hard for companies to find new chairmen? “No,” he says, “but today there are many more pressures than there were 10 years ago. And there are huge demands on chairmen: recruitment of non-executives, board effectiveness, remuneration.”

Is that why, according to speculation, he turned down the chairmanship of BAE? “Well, that was never going to be a runner, partly because of my age, and because I’m also chairman of Tate & Lyle, to which I have got an allegiance. It’s nothing to do with BAE, more to do with my diary.”

But he has always veered to the cautious side of pragmatism. Colleagues cite his extraordinary attention to detail and his obsession with financial control. He himself cites “tight management of cash” as one of the key drivers behind GKN’s survival, and he is constantly worried in case the top teams get too divorced from the group’s factory roots — hence his insistence that the board visits two different plants a year.

Sitting in St James’s is all very nice, he acknowledges, but it’s not really what GKN is about.

Lees is used to doing things his own way. Born in Scotland to an English father and Scottish mother, the eldest of three sons, he chose accountancy after a public-school education more to show his father he could make it without the navy than from any sense of vocation. When he was later offered a job by Handley Page, an aircraft manufacturer which his accountancy firm assigned him to, he jumped at the chance. “Making things just had more attraction for me.”

Handley Page went bust, and Lees got headhunted to GKN Sankey in Shropshire, but not before learning his most important lesson: what happens in a business when you start running out of cash. “If you haven’t worked in a business where that happens, the discipline of cash is not that strong. Creditors want paying, issues with the pension scheme — that stayed with me as a businessman for the rest of my life.”

It defined him as he worked his way up GKN through a number of finance posts, and through conditions of high inflation, low inflation, huge industrial unrest, a massive reduction in workforce numbers, and possible takeover by others.

He followed fellow accountant Sir Trevor Holdsworth to the top — both numerate men with an eye to strategy. Similar styles? “Trevor was a very good thinker, good at reading the runes,” says Lees with a chuckle. “I think I’m probably crisper in the decision taking, but perhaps you could find a nice way of rephrasing that so it won’t offend Trevor, as I know he’ll read this with interest!” His best decision, he says, was buying Westland (first stake 1988, full control 1994). “All investments are important, but few are transformers, whereas going into Westland gave GKN an opportunity it didn’t have before.”

That’s the same Westland, currently a joint venture with Italian business Agusta, which analysts are speculating GKN chief executive Kevin Smith may now sell, as the group prepares for another growth spurt once the current wintery economic cycle is over.

Does Lees expect to see a lot of changes after he leaves? He looks wary. “I’m not sure there’s a huge amount to do, but then outgoing people always say that, don’t they?” Others suspect it will be tough for him to leave a business to which he has given half his life. Chairing Tate & Lyle, another firm with a long heritage, will be a good distraction, and opera lovers may see more of him at the Royal Opera House, where he is chairman of finance, a job for which he shamelessly lobbied Sir Colin Southgate, the ROH chairman.

Surprisingly, what he’s most looking forward to is spending a bit more time working on his lawn at home in Shropshire. Walking behind the mower — no sit-down for him — on a beautiful day, the trees in bud, getting the lines just right, everything tidy and in order. You imagine that’s how he hopes to leave GKN, too, when the door finally shuts behind him.