The first thing I see on arriving at Sir George Mathewson’s 18-acre Perthshire estate is a large Saltire blowing in the wind. The second is a fierce-looking Irish wolfhound. They seem appropriate totems for the self-styled saviour of Scottish banking — a man who has a reputation for both bark and bite.

The Saltire belongs to his gardener. The dog is as docile as Pluto. Mathewson, too, displays little of the gung-ho, macho style attributed to him by the city. In the last fortnight he has teamed up with his old rival Sir Peter Burt, the former chief executive of Bank of Scotland, to launch a rescue package for the troubled bank HBOS as an alternative to the hastily devised bid from Lloyds TSB.

“Two claymore-waving knights who have galloped over the horizon in a bold attempt to rescue the battered and bloodied bank,” was one of the more fanciful descriptions of the “tartan two” as they inevitably have been dubbed.

“It has not been the easiest of weeks,” says Mathewson, showing me into a spacious sitting room while his elegant wife Sheila fetches coffee. It is a room which, despite its scale, is cosy rather than grand. Photographs of family in gowns jostle for space with photographs of family collecting gongs. Banking trophies nestle among the bookshelves, discreet reminders that the man in the beige jumper on the opposite sofa is one of the titans of the banking world.

“I had no great desire to get involved,” he says. “But I also felt that I was uniquely placed. In the end I felt that if I could do it, I should.”

It was Burt who approached Mathewson. They have called for HBOS’s chairman Sir Dennis Stevenson and its chief executive, Andy Hornby, to stand aside and allow them to take control using the recapitalisation money provided by the government to refloat the sinking bank.

The proposal has had a mixed reception in the city but it has certainly set the Scottish wildcat among the Square Mile pigeons, with newspapers, including the Financial Times, starting to echo Scottish voices in questioning the potential consequences of the Lloyds TSB bid.

“I think it is extremely damaging,” says Mathewson of the deal on the table, which would see HBOS subsumed by Lloyds TSB and leave Scotland without an independent bank. “This deal is bad in many ways. It’s bad for what it does to Edinburgh, for the jobs it will lose in England and Scotland and for the shareholders.”

Mathewson is keen to play down the political element of the bid and stresses that the HBOS takeover is “a UK issue,” not just the banking equivalent of the Calcutta Cup. He has as much chance of doing so as a first-time buyer has of getting a 110% mortgage. There has not been such a politically charged takeover since Guinness swallowed Distillers and with it a bellyful of Scottish pride.

Mathewson and Burt delayed their proposal until after the Glenrothes by-election for fear of being portrayed as political meddlers, an allegation given added piquancy by the fact that Mathewson came out publicly and supported the Scottish National party before the last Holyrood election. It was a move that was widely credited with giving Alex Salmond much-needed credibility in the business community but one that Mathewson may now be regretting.

“Maybe I’m paying for it now,” he says. “People can use it. Gordon might think I lost him the election. There were only a few votes in it.”

He is at a loss to understand why Brown, a Scot, is so antipathetic to the proposal to keep HBOS independent. “In order to facilitate the Lloyds TSB transaction they’ve put the fear of God into the HBOS shareholders,” he says. “That’s the strategy, government strategy as well as Lloyds TSB’s strategy.”

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