MEETING Lord Leitch is like being nuzzled affectionately by a giant Scottie dog.

“Och, so they’ve put you in here,” he says, bounding in and rescuing me from a tiny meeting room at Lexicon Partners, his corporate-finance adviser in the City of London.

In an instant he is herding me down the hall with a verve that belies his 58 years, launching into friendly chitchat.

“A name like Davidson, I thought you might be Scottish.”

Not for three generations.

“Oh well,” he grins, looking like a firmer-jawed version of Charles Kennedy. Dunfermline-born Leitch, a renowned networker, likes making connections.

By now we are in the boardroom. “This is Wallace,” says Leitch, introducing a crumple-faced man who smiles benignly. Wallace Dobbin, an old business colleague, is as short and sardonic as Leitch is burly and expansive. He is riding shotgun here, in case his lordship needs any help with my questions.

But Sandy Leitch, as those who have worked with him know, is pretty good at sorting things out for himself.

A coalminer’s son, he rose to become boss of Allied Dunbar in the 1990s and, later, regional chief at the global insurance giant Zurich, making millions in the City along the way.

More recently, he has made important friends in the Labour party.

Last year he stepped down from Zurich “to go plural” and was quickly ennobled. He then threw himself into a review of skills, education and productivity for the government. A report with recommendations is due next year.

Others might know him better as the Labour peer outed as Kimberly Quinn’s “Fourth Man” (after Mr Quinn, David Blunkett, and Simon Hoggart). But it’s best not to get too excited — the two dated seven years ago when both were between marriages. “It was just a brief friendship,” he smiles.

Anyway, Leitch wants to talk about something else entirely: his new venture, a financial-services start-up called Intrinsic that will help consumers through the increasingly complex world of savings, pensions and bonds. Leitch has raised £30m from backers including HBOS and Sanlam, the South African group, and plans to launch early next year. He has already got some of his old Zurich crew on board, including Dobbin and Henry Ronaldson, both former marketing chiefs.

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