John Caudwell, the mobile phone retail billionaire, is worrying that the readers of the FT will think him “stark raving barmy”.

He might have a point. He sometimes seems like a billionaire on a budget. Raised in the Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent, he continued to buy orange juice from Happy Shoppers after becoming one of Britain’s richest men. He’s a helicopter fan who travels EasyJet and a yacht owner who this year cancelled his holiday on the vessel because someone else was willing to pay him to use it.

Other parts of his life are similarly contradictory. Mr Caudwell admits to being a “hard taskmaster” when asked if he sometimes terrified his staff, but one who intends to give to charity the lion’s share of the more than ￡1bn he made from Phones 4U .