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That’s okay, then. He makes it sound so simple you end up thinking, crikey, why couldn’t we have come up with that? If Zumwinkel knows, he’s not saying, though he does slip in the occasional dig, punctuating his near-perfect English with a nice line in dry wit.

What was the German postal service like when he took it over? “It was lacking quality, ran a big deficit, employed 370,000 people, had huge union problems — maybe this sounds familiar to you.” Cue arched eyebrow.

Likewise when you ask him why he took an 80% cut in salary to leave his job running Quelle, a successful mail-order firm, more than a decade ago to take on the reorganisation of the German post office. “I thought it would be important if I could do a really good job for what had been a 500-year-old institution. And I had a rich father. Ha-ha.”

In fact, his father had built up a retail chain after the second world war which Zumwinkel and his brother had sold. “We put the money in the bank and I went to business school.”

He attended Wharton in America and Munster in Germany, and then took a job with McKinsey, advising clients on finance and marketing, until one of his customers, Quelle, offered him a job. He leapt into the then-Deutsche Bundespost in 1990, and now sits on a five-year contract, something UK executives would look on with wonder. “Oh no — it ensures stability,” smiles Zumwinkel.

And you might say he’s earned it. On top of sorting out the inefficiencies endemic in the old German system, he also had to deal with the absorption of the communist state post office from East Germany. So what was his prescription? “We put the whole mail system in the shredder and started again, investing in 83 new mail centres working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The operation was also partly privatised — Deutsche Post is now 50% owned by the German government, with the remaining 12% owned by a bank and 38% by 300,000 shareholders. The intention is for the government to sell its stake before 2007, and not even retain a “golden share” for control.

Now it’s in good financial shape — Zumwinkel claims he can pay off the group’s debt out of cashflow in 10 months — and has a client list of big corporations using its services.

Others argue that the group, which is now gobbling up firms across Asia, faces formidable problems of integration, and simply doesn’t have the managerial depth to be a proper global player. It also has weak operating margins and is already encountering stiff resistance to its ambitions in America, where DHL’s rivals Fedex and UPS are throwing everything they can think of in its way. There is little pro-German sentiment there, after the wrangles over lack of support for American military action in the Gulf.

Could politics be the obstacle Zumwinkel hasn’t planned for? If he thinks Britain is difficult to bust into, wait until he tries France. Zumwinkel smiles. All obstacles will be overcome. But then, couldn’t someone else stride in and buy the German post office after 2007? “Ja,” he says, before giving a look down his long nose. “Theoretically.” I’ll take that as a no for now, then.