Walker to take over from Agius at Barclays

Barclays has hired the City grandee Sir David Walker on a salary of £750,000 to take over as chairman with the brief of mending the bank's battered reputation.

Sir David, currently senior adviser to Morgan Stanley International and a former deputy chairman at Lloyds, is perhaps best known for heading a review into banking following the Lehman Brothers collapse and subsequent financial crisis.

He will take over in November from the current chairman, Marcus Agius, who resigned in the wake of the Libor scandal, only to have to return on a temporary basis when the chief executive, Bob Diamond, also quit over the affair. The job will give him the chance to practise what he preached in his banking review: one of its main findings was that chairmen of big City banks should be tougher.