The fault’s all Brown’s. He put in the system of bank regulation which failed catastrophically when put to the test. So the humiliation’s properly his.

Though I must say I’ve always found the idea of a bank run by Geordies somewhat improbable. In this case the guys running the bank weren’t even bankers, amazingly enough.

If you reversed “private” and “public” it could be a sentence from a Thatcher era newspaper. A good indication of progress, I suppose.