He holds one of the most powerful corporate jobs in America. His admirers (and customers) include Bono, George W. Bush and the Queen. This year the readers of Time magazine put him among the 100 most influential people on Earth.

Could Jonathan Ive, the publicity-shy Essex boy who started his career designing toilets and combs, be close to performing one of the most extraordinary coups in American business history?

Could this 40-year-old gym-toned, shaven-headed, Aston Martin-driving Brit, who lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco, with his wife, who is a historian, and their twin sons, be the next man to run Apple Computer?

Mr Ive, known to colleagues as Jony, is already Apple’s senior vice-president of industrial design, credited widely with the development of every Apple product from the iMac to the iPhone.

Sales of Mr Ive’s iPhone in Europe are already set to reach half a million – way ahead of analysts’ forecasts. Meanwhile, the iMac, which Mr Ive first revealed nine years ago in Paris, explaining that he wanted it to look like a grapefruit, is continuing to convert more and more PC users to its anorexic design and simpler, less buggy operating system.

Mr Ive’s efforts were rewarded by the Queen last year with a CBE. It has since been revealed that Her Majesty’s appreciation went deeper than many thought: the 81-year-old monarch is the owner of a 6Gb Royal iPod, a gift from Prince Andrew.

But how could a boy from Chingford, East London, ever replace Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and CEO. Although Mr Jobs, 52, is considered by some a tyrant (“being Steved” is shorthand for being fired at Apple), he also an icon and more revered than he is reviled.

And yet he is under growing pressure to name his ultimate replacement, as many fear that a company built on one man’s personality needs a clear succession plan. Jess McMullin, a prominent Silicon Valley blogger, has gone as far as to write an open letter to Apple’s board of directors, pointing out that it is their “fiduciary duty to develop a succession plan”, and that Jonathan Ive should be at the top of their list.

Dan Moren, co-editor of MacUser, agrees. He describes Mr Ive as “the man who embodies what Apple is perhaps most famous for – design”.

There are other reasons for all the talk of succession at Apple – or, as the company’s obsessive followers like to say, the need for a “postSteve scenario”. The company has been made vulnerable by a scandal over stock options – essentially, the opportunity to buy stock for aknockdown price in the hope of selling it at a profit later – that emerged in August last year and has refused to go away.

Apple is one of hundreds of companies accused of unfairly rigging its stock options programme to ensure guaranteed windfalls for executives. On Wall Street, high-profile casualties continue to mount: on Thursday the former chief executive of United-Health Group agreed to forfeit almost half a billion dollars in stock options and pay a $7 million fine to settle an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, America’s financial watchdog.

The SEC has indicated that it has no plans to take action against Apple, but it has filed fraud charges against Nancy Heinen, the company’s former general counsel, and settled an investigation into Fred Anderson, the computer company’s former chief financial officer.

Despite Apple’s reassurances to the public, many are convinced that the SEC is still circling – and as the case against Ms Heinen progresses (she denies any wrongdoing) interest in Apple’s internal politics is only likely to heighten.

It is thought that Mr Jobs himself has been asked to give an official statement, or deposition, as part of the case. Apple maintains that Mr Jobs did nothing wrong, and is eager to point out that the company has been praised by the SEC for its “swift, extensive and extraordinary cooperation”. Yet Apple is also facing a revised lawsuit from a powerful San Francisco law firm that claims that Mr Jobs made hundreds of millions of dollars from unfairly “backdated” stock options.

No matter how remote the possibility of Mr Jobs standing down might be, some investors would be happier if Mr Ive was named officially as the Apple CEO’s successor to avoid future doubt.

Mark Molumphy, the lawyer who is filing the revised lawsuit against Apple, conceded to The Times that Mr Ive was more or less untouchable as far as the stock options litigation goes. “The evidence we’ve seen does not implicate him,” he said.

Mr Ive has admitted that he is more of a designer than a computer geek. “I went through college having a real problem with computers,” he said at a rare speech in 2003. “I was convinced that I was technically inept. Right at the end of my time at college, I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use.”

As an art and design student at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) Mr Ive designed a pebble-shaped object to replace credit cards, a pen for people who like to fiddle with pens and a white plastic hearing aid for deaf children. Unsurprisingly, he graduated with first-class honours while also winning two Royal Society of Arts student design awards.

Later he co-founded his own design studio, Tangerine, whose clients included the toilet manufacturer Ideal Standard. Another of his clients was a then-struggling computer company called Apple, which had just fired its co-founder, Mr Jobs.

By 1992 Mr Ive had moved to Apple’s headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, in Northern California. When Mr Jobs returned from exile in 1997, Mr Ive was almost fired amid the confusion. But it didn’t take Mr Jobs long to realise that the man who could turn the company around was already working for him.

Mr Ive was quickly promoted to design chief and launched his first key product: the translucent iMac G3, modelled defiantly on a gumdrop (or, more likely given his British heritage, a wine gum). As part of his research, Mr Ive went on a field trip to a jelly bean factory. At the iMac’s debut in Paris, Mr Ive railed against the “beige box” culture of PCs.

“The computer industry is creatively bankrupt,” he declared. “We knew that the iMac was fast, we didn’t need to make it ugly.”

It was the beginning of a remarkable turnaround for Apple, and a series of hit products – including the all-white iMac, the iPod and now the iPhone – that have helped the company’s stock to rise by more than 1,000 per cent in ten years.

Mr Ive and Mr Jobs are said to talk at least once a day, and Mr Ive shares his boss’s perfectionism (it is claimed that Mr Jobs demanded that the iMac not have a single visible screw).

Mr Ive’s salary is not disclosed by Apple, but the company’s revival is thought to have made him very, very wealthy – hence the Aston Martin. It has also brought him many celebrity friends, including Bono, David Byrne, the Talking Heads lead singer, and the designer Paul Smith.

Once described by Business Week magazine as “looking like a graduate student who got lost on the way to Starbucks”, Mr Ive’s rise to power at Apple has astonished company insiders. Apple, after all, is a insular organisation – cultish, some say – and Mr Ive is now considered the Man Behind the Curtain.

“I think Steve Jobs has found somebody in Jony who knows how to complete or even exceed his vision, and do it time and time again,” said Chee Pearlman, who hosted the event at which Mr Ive spoke four years ago.

Mr Ive works in complete secrecy – many Apple employees are not allowed inside his studio – with a dozen or so staff, all of whom earn more than $200,000 a year. His team, which includes a German, an Italian and a New Zealander, is said to come up with some of its best ideas while sitting in the studio’s kitchen eating pizza. Like his boss, and like employees of Apple’s retail stores, Mr Ive turns up to work every morning in jeans, trainers, T-shirt and polo neck sweater.

There are sceptics, of course. Some have suggested that Mr Ive lacks the charisma to become “Steve 2.0”, and that he could never deliver Mr Jobs’s Hollywood-style press conferences, replayed endlessly on YouTube.

And yet of all the potential succession candidates, the Briton who once described himself as technically inept is by far the favourite. True to form he is keeping a low profile.

Susan Lundgren, an Apple spokeswoman, told The Times: “Jony feels his time would be better spent doing his job than doing interviews.”

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