It is not clear when Lord Myners first met Sir Fred Goodwin, but it is highly likely that their earliest meetings may not have been in the most cordial of circumstances.

Paul Myners was running City fund manager Gartmore and was on the board of its parent, NatWest, when it was taken over by Royal Bank of Scotland in March, 2000.

Goodwin is said to have found Myners “arrogant” at the time. Shortly afterwards, as Sir Fred was being promoted from deputy to chief executive of RBS, Myners was on his way out. It seems likely that, ever since, Myners has borne a grudge. Certainly there has never been any warmth between the two men.

Myners had to wait more than eight years for his revenge but it came last October when he led the Treasury team that negotiated the part-nationalisation of Britain's banks.

He and Goodwin faced each other across the table at various points during the talks, which took place at the Treasury on October 7. Sir Fred's assessment has since gone into history: “Less of a negotiation, more of a drive-by shooting.”

Myners is certainly a driven man. Born in 1948, he spent his first three years in a children's home in Bath, before being chosen for adoption by a Truro shopkeeper and his hairdresser wife. His name, Paul, came from the fact that all the baby boys had been christened after Jesus's Disciples. He once recalled: “We were all there in a row. Every 11th one was called Paul.”

Myners, who has since credited his mother for imbuing him with her Methodist values, won a scholarship to the local independent school, for which he played rugby, before going on to study as an economics teacher at the University of London.

His first job, on graduating, was at a girls' secondary school in Wandsworth, South London, but it was not a happy experience. “It was the largest girls' school in the country — the job was more about keeping discipline than teaching.”

Myners, who has five children from his two marriages, then joined the business desk of The Daily Telegraph. He stayed there for three years before being offered the chance, in 1974, to be a junior fund manager at NM Rothschild, where he eventually became a director.

He joined Gartmore in 1985 and was there until the RBS takeover. Among the jobs subsequently taken up by Myners — who made an estimated £30 million during his career at Gartmore — were the chairmanships of Marks & Spencer and of the Guardian Media Group.

He has also served as chairman of the Low Pay Commission — ironic, given his current row with Goodwin — as a trustee of the Tate Gallery and as a member of the Court of the Bank of England. Those who know him say Myners, possibly because of his time at The Daily Telegraph and Guardian, has always regarded himself as good at media work.

One former City journalist, who knew him well, recalls how Myners would frequently ring him with stories: “He was chairman of M&S at the time — it seemed odd to get so many calls from someone like that.

“The other thing he would do, if you had been on a day off and he'd tried to ring you, would be to call you the next day and say ‘did you see the story on page 15 of such and such a paper? I rang you but you weren't in, so I had to leak it to someone else.' What sort of man does that? It was weird.”

Myners was also well connected politically, supporting the Brownite think-tank the Smith Institute, where Ed Balls worked after leaving the Treasury in 2004 to stand for Parliament. He donated £12,000 to Mr Brown's Labour leadership campaign in June, 2007.

Even before becoming City Minister — despite saying in 2006 that he would never accept a peerage — Myners' political leanings had got him into trouble.

In December 2007, on BBC One's Question Time, he called David Cameron and George Osborne “arrogant, superior young toffs, neither of whom have done a serious day's work in their life”.

All this was very different from Sir Fred who — despite knowing Mr Brown and being a regular visitor to No 11 when he was Chancellor — was never a Labour luvvie.

Ironically, in view of his spat with Sir Fred, one of Myners' last jobs before becoming City Minister was to head the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority — the body leading the Government's attempt to encourage people to save for their retirement.

Doubtless Sir Fred wishes Myners had retired some time ago.

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