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Not true, says De Lapuente. “We don’t have any agreements, but we do discourage employees from working for rivals.”

Really? That seems a bit mafia-esque.

De Lapuente laughs nervously. Executives do go to rivals, he says, one went recently to Kimberly-Clark. “I just asked that he didn’t work on business that was in direct competition with what he had been on. They honoured that.”

De Lapuente himself, like most P&G bosses, has never moved firms. The son of a Spanish businessman father and English mother, he was brought up in Portugal, Spain, Brazil and England, and has worked for P&G across Europe since he left university. His nomadic upbringing, following his father’s jobs around, and his boarding-school education made him perfect multinational material. His dad worked for Pepsi, and at least one of De Lapuente’s friends thinks the son may be proving a competitive point to the father.

De Lapuente says simply that P&G is home. “I am a gypsy,” he grins. “This company is my roots.”

It is clearly his life. He started on Fairy Liquid, worked on Ariel, got his big break selling Always, and even married an executive from Saatchi & Saatchi, one of P&G’s long-term agencies. He’s always loved the work, he says, though he acknowledges “femcare” was a bit of a conversation stopper at parties. “My wife was delighted when I stopped doing that,” he laughs. “She was so tired of me discussing her preferences. But yunno, I didn’t use the product.”

His biggest break was being sent to sort out P&G’s loss- making subsidiary in Turkey. “It was my defining career moment.” He turned it round and from that moment, his star was in the ascendant. “We use the ‘has done/can do’ principle,” says another P&G colleague. “Chris’s track record speaks for itself.”

And it has rewarded him well: there’s a blue Porsche parked outside and a big house five minutes’ drive away in Weybridge. Little surprise, then, that De Lapuente is passionate about the business. He admits he loves stalking shoppers in supermarkets, quizzing them on their choices, and he talks animatedly about market-share targets in different sectors — 60% here, 70% there.

Numbers are vital. His current mission statement for employees is “constantly breaking records together”. He’s determined to show me a video of P&G’s last British employee convention, when the senior management team did a Maori haka on stage, then everyone was co-ordinated for some mass, musical stick-banging, followed by the world’s biggest-ever balloon burst.

It looks, I’m afraid, absolutely excruciating, a triumph of the organisation over the individual. Doesn’t he realise outsiders find this kind of hard-eyed zealotry tough to take? “That’s a risk,” shrugs De Lapuente. “So is this,” he adds, waving his hand around to encompass the conversation. “I mean, you can be as nasty about us as you want.”

Others say he reads people very well, his low-key approach particularly popular with the women executives now coming up through P&G. But there is always the focus on winning, and the meticulous attention to detail. “Chris is understated but so focused,” says friend and former colleague James Middleton. “This, remember, is a guy who did a two-year degree course just so he could get into business quicker.” He is unique, adds Tamara Ingram, ex-Saatchi, now head of Visit London, “because he’s very strategic but at the same time he has immense human qualities.”

Such comments will do De Lapuente no favours at P&G, of course. “Actually,” he asks plaintively, when we finish, “is there any way you could write this up as more about the company than me?” No chance. He looks pained. In retribution, he says I must sponsor him in his first triathlon — running, swimming, cycling — which he is competing in today. He’s trying to get fit before he walks to the North Pole next year.

The North Pole? “I need the challenge,” he says. “Yunno, every year I have been given something different to do, or been posted somewhere new, but I’ve done the same thing in the UK for two years now.

So next year I’m joining an expedition.”

He smiles at my disbelief. Anyway, he’s got my £20 towards Cancer Research UK for the triathlon — P&G’s acclaimed powers of persuasion are still very much intact. Only when I tell him that I won’t pay if he takes more than five hours do I see his confidence falter. “Erm, right,” he says hesitantly, clearly doing the sums.

“Tell him you’ve sponsored me to beat him,” says one of his friends later when I recount the story. “Chris is so competitive he’ll do it in three.”