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Hence Clare’s nonchalant response to suggestions that, by talking up Dixons’ prospects this week after 12 months of poor performance, he has in effect put his own head on the block. He shrugs. “I think every chief executive puts his head on the block in terms of trying to deliver results,” he says.

He is similarly unmoved by ribbing that he’s still not as visible as Kalms, his more charismatic predecessor, now company president. And won’t his drive into Europe inevitably lead him into conflict with Kalms, who is a passionate eurosceptic? It’s hard to see how the euro wouldn’t benefit Dixons’ future growth now.

Clare pauses, the only hesitation in our interview. Then he says: “Um, from a corporate perspective, we don’t have a view on the euro.”

He seems uncomfortable. Actually, he says, he’d prefer it if I didn’t write about Kalms at all.

Ah. Others think the comparisons with Kalms must get to him, but he never shows it. And despite the fact that Kalms still writes the opening welcome to Dixons’ corporate website, there are no doubts inside the company as to who now runs the show, says one. Clare is just a different sort of boss for a business that is far bigger, far more complex than the one Kalms handed over. He is also a far shyer man.

Much of that style was stamped into him when he was working his way up at Mars, the confectionery group he joined after leaving university. His childhood was spent in Great Yarmouth, where his dad was a commercial artist working in advertising and his mum a descendant of local fishing families. Colleagues say you can still hear the East Anglia in his accent when he’s in the mood, but these days it’s further away than ever.

Mars trained him as a salesman, taught him marketing, and sent him abroad. He loved it, but eventually left because he had married and started a family, and needed a settled base. He took a job with Ladbrokes, so he could remain in Britain. Ironically, Ladbrokes put him in charge of international development and, within three years, wanted to send him to Brussels.

That is how he ended up at Dixons as marketing director. “We snatched him off the boat,” laughs Mark Souhami, Dixons’ deputy chairman. Even then, he adds, it was clear that Clare was a possible chief executive in the making, even if he was different to those at the top.

“We’re great believers in opposites,” Souhami says, “but don’t make the mistake in thinking that just because John is a hugely competent corporate executive, he’s not passionate about the business. He is.”

Hence Clare devours figures most of the day and through the night — printing them off his computer as soon as he wakes up, studying them in the car on the way to the office, working his way through them in review meetings, printing more off before he leaves in the evening, always looking for the next problem, the next opportunity.

“Retail is detail,” says his former finance director, Ian Livingston, now at BT. “And John has that ability to take in huge amounts of information, and simplify it. And he’s good at finding solutions. His approach is always ‘let’s step back and look at the background’.” And he’s a likeable boss, rarely letting the pressure get to him or allowing it to sour relationships.

Now Clare has to utilise all that to push further into Europe, and continue the drive in Britain away from smaller stores to larger outlets. “Fewer and bigger in major retail markets,” says Clare, summing up his strategy for the Currys and Dixons chains. That will help him get round all those stores.

And, of course, he has the stock market’s appetite to satisfy. Will that make him step up the pace? Unlikely. As colleagues point out, he appears effortlessly self-contained. To relax, he worries about Tottenham Hotspur — he’s an avid fan, a tendency he inherited from his London-born dad — or he potters about in his motorboat on the Thames near his home outside Maidenhead.

Then he’ll be back on the phone, figures in front of him, day in, day out. Why the need? “I think it’s driven by professional necessity rather than anything else,” he says, “but I suppose it’s an addiction that’s hard to drop.” The pressure will bring no panic — but nobody ever supposed that it would.

VITAL STATISTICS

Born: August 2, 1950
Marital status: married
School: Gt Yarmouth Grammar
Salary package: £573,000
Home: near Maidenhead
Car: silver Mercedes 500
Favourite author: Ian Rankin
Favourite film: Champions
Favourite music: Singers Unlimited
Interests: Tottenham Hotspur and boating on the Thames

JOHN CLARE’S WORKING DAY

THE boss of Dixons gets up at 6am — “slowly”. He makes his wife a cup of tea, dresses, prints the latest sales figures off his computer and jumps into his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. He rarely eats breakfast.

The drive from his Maidenhead home to Dixons’ head office in Hemel Hempstead takes an hour, during which the first calls of the day are made. “The sales figures affect my mood,” says John Clare. “Then I study all the papers, not for the news but the ads, to see what the competitors are doing.”

Mondays are spent analysing the weekend’s figures. Tuesday to Thursday, Clare goes on the road, visiting stores. He loves the store visits but it’s getting harder. “There are just so many of them,” he says.

If nothing is on in the evening, Clare will be home by 7.30pm for dinner and in bed by 11pm — but not before he has checked if there are any fresh figures to analyse.