EXPERIENCE is a wonderful thing. In a good doctor it brings pattern recognition: you recognise the symptoms, then diagnose and cure. And in a good banker?

Sir Brian Pitman, the venerable City heavyweight brought in to head Virgin’s bid for Northern Rock, offers a toothy smile.

“There’s nothing very new in all of this,” he says pensively, dissecting the reasons behind Northern Rock’s difficulties. “It really is like the problems we had in the early 1970s.” Back then, he was a rising star at Lloyds Bank, part of the “lifeboat committee” tasked by the Bank of England with sorting out London’s secondary banking crisis.

His analysis of what went wrong – outfits growing too quickly, relying on borrowed money, chasing market share before all else – has an echo over time. “In banking and insurance you can expand rapidly if you take more risk,” he nods. “It’s one of the great difficulties in financial services.”

And now Pitman, at 76, an age when most are happy to take on little more strenuous than the odd crossword or two, wants to get busy again. His emergence as prospective executive chairman of a Virgin-branded Northern Rock – should its bid jump the hurdles demanded by the authorities – has surprised quite a few.

Not least because his reputation is – dare I say it – rock-solid. Former chairman and chief executive of Lloyds TSB, he is credited with building that group into a banking pow-erhouse in the 1980s and 1990s before moving on to chair the retailer Next and to sit on a clutch of prestigious boards. He is simply one of the most respected bankers around.

So why risk all that in a venture that some feel distinctly uneasy about? Is it just one last hurrah for the old warhorse? “No,” he says calmly, “it’s because I don’t want Northern Rock to go bust. A big bank going bust in the UK?” He shakes his head. “And a lot of my friends have said I should do it. It would be a good thing for the City if I did.”

Sitting in the Mayfair offices of Greenhills, Virgin’s adviser on the bid, Pitman doesn’t bristle, that’s not his style. He veers from friendly to firm, never angry, but he makes his point. Tall, bald and jowly, he mixes a sharp sense for numbers with genial solidity and obvious enthusiasm for the challenge.

He is also the least pompous of septuagenarian City grandees: he may play his golf at posh St George’s Hill in Weybridge but still takes the London Underground to meetings and is happy fiddling with his iPod. It’s part of the reason why many say he is an engaging figure to work with.

But Virgin’s ventures are not all glowing successes and Virgin’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, is an odd fit with any institutional banking operation; he is, after all, a self-confessed teenage tax dodger and a billion-aire who protects his wealth with an arcane structure of overseas funds. Who needs whom in this relationship?

Pitman doesn’t blink when I put it to him, although he does skirt round the issue at length. He has known Branson for a long time, he says, and sits on the board of Virgin Atlantic. He was initially asked only for advice about the prospective Northern Rock bid, and had no intention of chairing it. But the more he looked at it – he sent Virgin’s bidding team away twice to come back with worse-case scenarios for the economy – the more he felt he should get involved.

“I felt it was doable and worthwhile, there are an awful lot of jobs hanging on the end of it, plus there’s the Northern Rock Foundation in the northeast, and the reputation of the UK. It’s not about Richard Branson in that context.”

And, he points out, Branson will not have control or even sit on the new entity’s board, should the Virgin bid be successful. That board will be five “insiders” – himself and Jayne-Anne Gadhia, Virgin Money chief executive, plus a finance director, a Virgin director, and a representative of the consortium backing Virgin – and six nonexecutives, many of them banking heavyweights. The six will include a top name with northeast roots to be senior nonexec.

What is vital, though, is that Northern Rock gets a new brand. Under Pitman’s plan, the consortium backing Virgin (Wilbur Ross, Toscafund, First Eastern) will inject £500m in cash, raise another £500m via a rights issue, then “inject” Virgin Money – possibly worth £250m – into Northern Rock, renaming every high-street branch.

“We’ve done a lot of work on this and Northern Rock, the brand, is so damaged they need a new brand. That’s why the brand profile of Virgin is important to this.”

But, he says, he would get involved only if he had executive control. “I’m not going to do this and risk my reputation. I want to be tight about the conditions under which we do things; I want to know what is happening in the assets-and-liabilities management of the company; I want to be involved in the daily accounts of the company; and if you are nonexecutive chairman, you’d simply be interfering with the chief executive all the time.”

That will reassure the Treasury – which will back a successful bid with £25 billion worth of bonds, to be repaid – but can he really oversee it all at age 76? Even John McCain, likely runner in the American presidential election, is a few years younger.

Pitman stiffens slightly. “You seem to think this is a change of pace for me. I assure you, if you looked at what I did last year, it’s not. I was in Singapore last week, flew out, stayed two days, flew back. I’ve been in New York, Athens and Moscow. I am perfectly fit and able to do the things I want to do.”

That much hasn’t changed. Pitman has been a driven man since his early upbringing. He was only nine weeks old when his father died in a car crash. His parents had eloped to marry. His mother never remarried until Pitman left home in Cheltenham. “Anyone who loses a father takes on responsibility quite quickly,” he says. “It made me self-reliant.”

Later, when Pitman was working at the Cheltenham & Gloucester building society, he saw a friend killed in a freak fall. That jolted him into taking his career more seriously. He joined and ascended Lloyds Bank shortly after. His success in turning Lloyds into an investors’ favourite cannot be underestimated. His focus on shareholder value was pioneering. He also targeted growth in the UK over acquisitions abroad, a strategy that succeeded until competition concerns blocked its way.

Crucially, he has worked through more “down-phases” of the market than any banker still on the scene. Old colleagues say that experience makes him the best chance Northern Rock could get.

“He is probably uniquely experienced,” says Sir David Walker, former chairman of Morgan Stanley International and one-time deputy chairman of Lloyds TSB. “Most people taking credit judgments these days have little experience of down-phases. Brian has been through all of it since the early 1970s.” And the key, adds Walker, is that Pitman is still intellectually curious, up for the challenge and keen to be engaged.

Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next, where Pitman was chairman from 1998 to 2002, backs that up. “The thing about Brian is that he is so enthusiastic about business. He gave us a real focus on return on equity.”

But will all that be enough to impress the Treasury, the Bank of England, and the Financial Services Authority, all of whom have a say? First on their agenda might be how quickly a Virgin-branded Northern Rock can pay back money – last week £91 billion pounds of debt was moved onto the government’s balance sheet to cover current guarantees.

Then there are Northern Rock’s shareholders, and the views of the European Commission – so far unknown – on any government involvement to factor in. Virgin’s bid has a 50-50 chance, at best.

Pitman shrugs when I put it to him. “We submitted plans on Monday. They include how we would deal with any upside in this, what we would give back to the government if we were more successful than expected. It’s very detailed. And there’s going to be further discussion, I imagine.” But that, he confirms, and proposals from Northern Rock’s own management team, are all that’s left on the table. “If the government don’t like any of it, they will nationalise it.”

What is clear, he adds, is that if Virgin does take on Northern Rock, the task will still be hellishly difficult. “We cannot compete like mad for deposits with government guarantees, others would object, we’d just be abusing our position. Competitors would be down the Treasury immediately – I would, if I were one of their CEOs.”

Yet still he feels it’s worth the effort, and makes this pledge to its 6,000 staff. “Northern Rock was not a bloated company – we want to keep as many staff as possible. It just expanded too quickly. It was not badly run from a cost angle.”

So where did it go wrong? He casts me a rheumy eye. “Analysts and journalists wrote it up that the rest of us were slow coaches in comparison, and once you start pushing people in that direction, they think they can walk on water. And in the end, you go under.”

Then he adds: “And the chairman was not a banker.” Point taken.

SIR BRIAN PITMAN’S WORKING DAY

THE prospective chairman of Virgin’s bid for Northern Rock wakes at his Weybridge house at 6am every morning. “I read the papers, look at the Blackberry, switch on the computer, see what’s going on in the world,” says Sir Brian Pitman.

Later he will take a train into London. His days are full of meetings at companies where he is an adviser or director – such as ITV, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and software firm Acturis, which he chairs. More recently, heading Virgin’s interest in Northern Rock, he has been in talks with the Treasury. He attends evening functions at least three times a week.

VITAL STATISTICS

Born:December 13, 1931

Marital status:married, with three children

School:Cheltenham Grammar School

First job:trombonist in a jazz band

Salary package:undisclosed, from numerous directorships and pension

Home:St George’s Hill, Weybridge

Car:blue Jaguar sports car

Favourite book:Fame is the Spur, by Howard Spring

Favourite music:Jackie Armstrong playing Sophisticated Lady on the trombone

Favourite film:DeLovely (the Cole Porter story)

Favourite gadget:iPod

Last holiday:Juan-les-Pins, France

DOWNTIME

SIR BRIAN PITMAN relaxes by listening to music – he played trombone in a jazz band when he was younger. “I love all forms of music and I’ve got the lot – CDs, iPods. I also go regularly to concerts and the theatre.”

He follows cricket and rugby keenly. Pitman is a member of Gloucestershire and Yorkshire cricket clubs and the MCC. He always attends the annual cricket festival in Cheltenham, his home town.

He also plays golf, but badly. “Too badly for a handicap and getting worse,” he says glumly. “But my wife is a regular player.” Old friends say Pitman is falsely modest – he is actually rather good.

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