Man on a Churchillian mission to clean up the outsourcer doing our dirty work

Taking that back is going to be big. Some of the best civil servants are moving to work on Brexit negotiations — the Government is going to need help to get stuff done.”

But if the new Cabinet is going to knock at Soames’ door, it hasn’t yet. As he waits for the call, it’s business as usual. He wears bright yellow braces and has “Serco and proud” embroidered on his blue herringbone shirt and black anorak.

I can’t think of another FTSE 100 boss who sports a uniform. “It wasn’t,” he maintains, “a weird branding master plan — just that when I joined, people were ashamed to work for Serco. To have a CEO say ‘I’m Serco, we’re doing good work, and I’m proud of it’ — that was important.”

He does seem genuinely proud when he describes the work of a 23-year-old female custody officer at Thameside prison last month. “As she went past a cell door, a prisoner threw a bucket of sick and faeces at her, smack in the f a c e . For pr i s oners , t here a re no brownie points for attacking a woman — it kicks off a major ruck.

“So this officer pulled the prisoner back into his cell, got in with him and shut the door. She pulled him under the shower with her to get rid of the shit, and hit the panic button.

“By shutting him in his cell, she saved him from the other prisoners, who would have killed him. That presence of mind, to save his life — knowing instinctively what was the right thing to do? I’m proud of that.”

Soames says he’s proud, too, of Serco’s work with asylum seekers despite its constant c o n t rove r s y. T h e re ’s Yarl’s Wood, which the prisons watchdog last year described as “a place of national concern”. Channel 4 filmed staff referring to the detention centre’s women and children as “animals” and “bitches”.