Sir Derek Wanless probably should have known better.

The Northern Rock non-executive director and chairman of its audit and risk committees certainly has no shortage of City experience.

The former chief executive of NatWest, Sir Derek is an adviser to Gordon Brown and has other directorships, including the chairmanship of Northumbrian Water. He is vice-chairman of the Statistics Commission and a member of the Board for Actuarial Standards at the Financial Reporting Council. So quite how Sir Derek, with his gold-plated CV, ended up at the centre of the biggest UK banking crisis in three decades is an interesting question. His roots may, in part, provide the answer. Now 59, Sir Derek grew up in Newcastle, Northern Rock’s home town, and was educated at the city’s Royal Grammar School – where Adam Applegarth, the stricken bank’s chief executive, is now a governor - before going on to King’s College, Cambridge. After graduating with a first-class degree in mathematics, he joined NatWest in 1970 and stayed there for almost his entire career, later taking time out to attend the programme for management development at Harvard University.

Rising steadily through the ranks, he was appointed group chief executive in March 1992, a position that he held until his retirement in October 1999. In March 2001, Gordon Brown, then the Chancellor, asked Sir Derek to lead a review of the long-term trends that might affect the health service in the UK.

In retrospect, the title chosen for his 2002 report on the NHS, Taking a Long-Term View, seems more than a little ironic, given the business model adopted by Northern Rock, the mortgage lender that he joined in 2000 as a nonexecutive director.

Sir Derek was knighted in 2005 for public service and is married with four children. He lives in Camberley, Surrey, and enjoys football, chess and walking.

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