James Stunt loves a superlative. The 36-year-old was, he says, 'the biggest blackjack player on planet earth'. He kicked his prescription-morphine addiction 'in world-record time'.
At the apogee of his shipowning success, he was running 'basically the world's largest private armada'. His godfather, the convicted money launderer and alleged gangster Terry Adams, is 'the most moralled' [sic] person he has ever met. James 'obviously' pays 'top whack' for the art collection he is assembling.
And he was party to the 'biggest bet in the world' - a £90m wager he won, at a profit of £45m. As for the grandiose (and notorious) cavalcade of hyper-expensive cars - typically, one Lamborghini, sandwiched by two Rolls-Royces and two top-of-the-price-tree Range Rovers - in which he cruises London, he explains that he has always loved cars and that it would embarrass him to have his 25-strong security team trail him in Ford Fiestas. Certainly, it feels good to be in the luxurious back seat of his Mansory-adapted Rolls-Royce Phantom, heading for the seventh-floor office he inhabits in the old MI5 building in Curzon Street.
There's only one Range Rover following us, but at the Phantom's wheel is Gabriel, a very large and very polite driver who's been with James for years and 'would take a bullet for me'. Strangely, given James's worries about security, the back window is open, the better for James to smoke his umpteenth Marlboro Gold of the afternoon. Still, when a pack of motorbikes comes up.