As Giles Thorley, the chief executive of Punch, squares up to a bid for Mitchells & Butlers, he may recall a time when the boot was on the other foot.

In late 2006, Mr Thorley found himself under pressure to sell Punch’s 1,400 managed pubs to Mitchells. He stood his ground, declaring: “They’d have to pay a very high price for them. It’s more valuable to us to keep them.”

Today, Mr Thorley is the potential bidder, having built up Punch to be Britain’s biggest pub chain since his arrival there in 2001, as executive chairman. He became chief executive two years later.

Aged 40, he qualified as a barrister but chose not to practice, moving instead to Nomura International in 1990, where he came under the wing of Guy Hands. Mr Hands plucked him out to become chief executive of Unique Pub Company, where he did such a good job that Hugh Osmond, another leisure entrepreneur, poached him to run the fledgeling Punch Taverns.

Mr Thorley split the enterprise into managed and tenanted businesses and floated the tenanted bit as Punch Taverns — at the second attempt, after having to cut the price. He swiftly built Punch into the main rival for Enterprise Inns as the biggest pub company in the UK and overtook Enterprise after acquiring Spirit Group for £2.7 billion. The deal reunited Punch with its old managed pub business.

He has since sold off a chunk of Spirit and converted several hundred pubs to tenancies. The group is now left with an estate of about 8,500 pubs, of which Spirit accounts for about 870.

Mr Thorley is also non-executive chairman of Tragus Group, the owner of the Café Rouge restaurant chain, which plans to float this year.

He attracted some unwelcome publicity last year when his salary was revealed in the report and accounts at £11.3 million, a sum that some reports contrasted with the hard times experienced by the publicans that ran Punch’s tenanted pubs. According to one survey, the gap between his pay and that of his employees was the widest in the FTSE 100. The company protested that most of this windfall was in the form of share options.

He was asked late last year what was the biggest challenge faced by his company. Moving on from the smoking ban, he replied. Mr Thorley also spoke of the need to focus on the role of the pub in the local community, as a way of heading off political pressure over consolidation among Britain’s big pub chains.

He lives in Cheltenham with his wife and three sons and has a house in France. Asked for his personal goal for 2008, he said: “To spend more time with the famly.” If the Mitchells deal goes ahead, it may be an ambition he has to defer.