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“Yes, I hate a mess,” he says. “My ex-wives were untidy. It drives me to distraction. At my new house I’m going to have a garage with an apartment on top in case one of my untidy daughters turns up.”

He laughs. Talk to anyone who knows Wood and they will tell you that the acerbic niggling is just his way of showing affection. He adores his daughters, seems rather fond of his ex-wives, and is constantly digging at everyone he’s close to.

He’s been jabbing at the Royal Bank of Scotland, which backed his original idea for Direct Line, ever since he parted company with it.

He rolls his eyes. “God, one of their secretaries used to ring up — he puts on an Edinburgh old-trout accent — “‘head office here’, and I used to say, ‘yes, head office here, too’.” He laughs, before adding. “Yeah, I got disenchanted with Royal Bank a bit.”

Although he never had a stake in Direct Line — a source of bitterness, perhaps — he earned millions from his performance-related deal with RBS. That garnered him bad publicity in the early 1990s, when he was one of the country’s highest-earning individuals, and some hate mail.

Maybe that’s why America suddenly seemed attractive. But he never cut his roots here and was lured back into another UK launch by Dennis Stevenson, chairman of HBOS. They met on the board of The Economist magazine.

Wood told him he was looking for partners and Stevenson sent him to see James Crosbie, HBOS’s chief executive. “Dennis,” says Wood, “is very cute.”

Stevenson says Wood is not the “difficult entrepreneur from central casting” that some think. He may be blunt, but his directness has purpose. “We’ve found him terrific to work with.”

Wood has promised to make Esure “a 21st-century Direct Line”. Even so, the early days were tough. It was only when Wood commissioned his mate Michael Winner to make those — how shall we put this? — distinctive “Calm down” commercials that Esure really started building business.

The ads are Wood and Winner’s little joke on the pretensions of the advertising world. Those are the freedoms you get when you are a rich man calling the shots in your own business empire.

Yet it is Wood’s knack with numbers that enables him to spot the opportunities that others have missed. “Yeah, I can feel numbers,” he says, “I can see the patterns.” It still surprises him that other, more qualified finance specialists are so innumerate.

He’s not sure where he got the gift. “I’m not like either of my parents, really.” His father was a small businessman — “he did a bit of insurance, bit of property” — his mother a housewife, cautious by nature. “I’d never have done anything if she’d had her way. She’d have wrapped me in cotton wool.”

Brought up in Surrey, with a big brother who was “more artistic”, Wood was destined to be a doctor until his father’s business interests crashed. “I said: ‘Great, I’ll go to work.’ That’s what I wanted anyway.”

So he joined a computer company, then worked his way round firms in the City and abroad, running back office. Those stints at places such as Schroders, Whitbread and Alexander Howden, a reinsurance specialist, did not fill him with respect for stuffy senior management.

When Howden collapsed in financial crisis, Wood thought up Direct Line as an escape route, despite having no experience of consumer-facing businesses. “How I persuaded people to back me, I’m not sure,” he grins. He just knew he was smarter than most of the employers he’d come across, and he had something to prove.

His use of call centres and irritating ads — Direct Line’s red phone on wheels — showed he could think outside the box. But a lot of his success, he says, was down to people. “If you’ve got happy staff, you’ve got half a chance of having happy customers. If you worry about shareholders you haven’t got a hope.”

And all of that was forged by the curious contradictions in his character: awkward but confident, shy but attention-seeking, a man who clearly develops deep bonds with colleagues yet is also an abrasive mickey-taker and intolerant partner.

Is he chippy? “No,” he mumbles, more surprised than affronted. Others say if he was, he wouldn’t be such a great motivator. Winner describes him as “the easiest man I’ve ever worked for. Very instinctive, absolutely direct and honest”. And Don Lewis, a former RBS director who was a non- executive at Direct Line, says that Wood the manager is “very informal, very charismatic. People love him”.

And it’s the people, you’d guess, who more than anything have brought Wood back. Launching Esure, he admits, was partly about employing some of his old colleagues. “They were begging me to come out and play again,” he smiles.

And that, I’d bet, is compensation for the less tidy life he has had at home. Two ex-wives, nearly a third. He loves chatting about it, as if that’s the bit he can’t quite get his head round.

“Yeah, I almost married again a few years ago and my lawyer said, ‘Peter, you just got out in time’. I mean, my second wife has more money than she knows what to do with. She even asked me to invest it for her. I said, ‘are you joking? You’d sue me if it went wrong!’” Is he dating at the moment? Big grin. “Nah, I’m single, but I saw that heiress in the Daily Mail the other day. £300m? She didn’t look that bad, did she? I thought I might apply . . .”

Calm down, Peter. He laughs and ushers me out. He’s got a plane to catch to Marbella for Easter. Tough life, eh?