‘The Barclay family don’t see this company as their cash cow’: Yodel chief executive Mike Hancox

Yodel chief executive Mike Hancox says the company’s improved performance was helped by hobbyists selling secondhand items to each other in the pandemic and has continued during the cost of living crisis. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

The secretive Barclay clan don’t have many public faces in their £6.4bn empire, but Mike Hancox can lay claim to being an insider.

His office in Liverpool may be 270 miles from Brecqhou, the Channel island that the senior Barclays transformed, but the chief executive of their delivery company Yodel has been associated with the tycoons for more than two decades through various ventures.