CHARLES DUNSTONE endured the most painful day of his career yesterday. Seventeen years ago Mr Dunstone signed his first client — Vodafone.

Seventeen years on, with his Carphone Warehouse company worth more than £3 billion, a personal fortune of £830 million (although a fair bit less after yesterday’s share price fall), Vodafone dumped him.

And there may be worse to come after Orange, perhaps tempted by the prospect of better commercial terms with Phones4U, Carphone’s big rival, said it would review its own supply relationship with Mr Dunstone at the end of the year.

Until yesterday, Mr Dunstone had barely put a foot wrong. He had started Carphone with savings of just £6,000 and his public school pal from Uppingham, David Ross, in a gloomy warehouse in West London.

To win Vodafone back, Mr Dunstone will need to launch the hard sell of his life, and to exploit the talent that launched his business in the first place.

Charles Dunstone was just 25 when he set up installing big phone handsets in the cars of small businessmen.

He cut his teeth as a salesman for NEC, working first in computers, and then in its mobile phone division. He was certain that the gadget that allowed plumbers and builders to pick up new clients on the move was a goer.

Soon he was confident enough to take retail premises and by 1992 he and Mr Ross, part of the moneyed Grimsby trawling and fish food family, had set up their first shop in Marylebone, West London.

Like their former high street rival and tycoon, John Caudwell, the pair rode to success on the back of the early boom in mobile phones.

Vodafone and BT Cellnet — today’ s O2 — were the group’s first clients. Mr Dunstone recalled recently selling the “Vodafone bricks” as they then were.

The maturation of the mobile market in the UK, although tough for the operators, helped to bolster Carphone’s success further.

The group, which floated in 2000, making Mr Dunstone a multimillionaire, positioned itself as the friendly impartial retailer that would help confused customers to cut through the bewildering array of tariffs and handsets on the market to find the best deal for them. Mr Dunstone had a thing about the shop staff he employed. He wouldn’t employ anyone who had worked for Phones4U — he wanted them to have not been moulded by his rival — and once publicly bemoaned the lazy state of customer service on the British high street.

For each phone Carphone sold, it secured a chunky commission. By 2003 Mr Dunstone had expanded it beyond mobile and into fixed-line under the TalkTalk brand.

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