Steve Pycroft has a word to describe things when they get a bit hairy. “It could have got a bit tasty,” he says of the decision to build the Shard.

Others in Mace at the time were less convinced of the probity of a move to build London’s tallest tower for a fixed price of £500m. “There were discussions at board level saying,  ‘can we not not do this?’, ‘Do we need to do lump sum because there is a major concern it will send us bust?’”

He recalls his daughter telling him after he had been discharged from a second spell in hospital with covid-19 last spring just how perilous things had got. She had managed to get a flight back from Australia, where she was travelling, to be at his bedside in spirit as visitors were banned from seeing those stricken with the virus in person.