Yesterday's rights issue U-turn isn't the first time that Steven Crawshaw has said one thing and done another. The chief executive of Bradford & Bingley, when he was appointed in March 2004, insisted then that there would be no change in direction.

“We are resolute that this is the right strategy,” he said on the day of his elevation. Ten weeks later he took the axe to the creation of his predecessor, Christopher Rodrigues, announcing plans to sell the estate agency business, the mortgage broking division, the property services unit and the network of financial advisers. Almost half the workforce was to be offloaded.

The drastic pruning was part of his vision to slim back to a specialist mortgage lender, pure and simple, one focused on two key customer groups - buy-to-let borrowers and self-certified borrowers, typically self-employed with no proof of the reliable income stream preferred by conventional lenders.

Despite some doubts that B&B could prosper with its smaller balance sheet and worries that self-cert borrowing was an accident waiting to happen, the new strategy seemed to be going OK. Then came the credit crunch. “We were standing pretty close when the bomb went off,” Mr Crawshaw recalled yesterday.

Like Northern Rock, B&B's reliance on the wholesale funding markets was quickly spotted as a potential problem. The anti-B&B mood in the City darkened: “In my first three years as chief executive, we were getting beaten up for not being more like Northern Rock. For the last nine months, we have been beaten up for being too like Northern Rock.”

It was a typically upfront if prickly statement from one of the more forthright of bank chief executives, one prepared to engage with his critics and one who may soon be fighting for his survival.

He began his career as a litigation solicitor before taking an MBA at Cranfield School of Management. He spent eight years at Cheltenham and Gloucester and Lloyds TSB, its parent company, before being poached by B&B in 1999 to be its flotation director, responsible for handling the transition from building society to listed company.

He joined the main board in 2002, taking responsibility for strategy, personnel and IT. A year later he was put in charge of lending. He took over from Mr Rodrigues in March 2004. He is chairman of the Council of Mortgage Lenders.

Last year Mr Crawshaw was paid £1.11 million and in nine years has accumulated a pension pot worth £1.8 million. Now 46, he is married with two sons, lives in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, and enjoys watching rugby.

Times Recommends

• Darling under pressure on record public debt
• Mortgage drought deepens on 32% lending fall
• Oil prices firm after 10% drop to below $130