When Gordon Brown was confronted with the run on Northern Rock in September 2007, he did everything in his power to avoid nationalisation. The bank was put up for auction and for six months he prevaricated, entertaining bids from all and sundry, including Richard Branson and avaricious private equity groups, until he accepted the advice of Goldman Sachs that the only equitable solution was public ownership. Even then the Prime [...]

The gathering of Barclays investors at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster on 23 April was inevitably a strange affair. At one and the same time, the bank has managed both to infuriate its investors and to win their admiration.

The patrician leadership of the bank, headed by the former dealmaker Marcus Agius (married to a Rothschild) and John Varley (who married into one of the Barclays-founding Quaker [...]

Alistair Darling has been Chancellor for less than two years. Yet, in conversation, he is able to let drop an unusual boast – in that time he has made more statements from the despatch box than any holder of that office in modern times, including his ubiquitous predecessor Gordon Brown. This is all rather surprising. In his previous great offices of state as Treasury chief secretary, secretary for social security, work [...]

This month, four colleagues and myself were summoned before John McFall's Treasury select committee at the Commons to give evidence on the media's role in the banking crisis. In the course of the questioning, Simon Jenkins remarked, to much merriment: "By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch."

Despite the irony, Jenkins, the only one of our number attending the 90-minute interrogation who was not [...]

When the normally elusive, patrician John Varley, ­Barclays’ chief executive, turned up on Channel 4 News a week ago, to extol the virtues of what is known in the trade as “quantitative easing” (steps to make credit easier or printing money), it was clear that something was up.

Among Britain's coterie of high-street bankers, Barclays has done all in its power to avoid being ensnared in the various rescue plans [...]

Traditionally it is the days and weeks after Christmas that are the most terrifying for retailers. The final quarter of the year arrives when rents have to be paid (this year, it is actually on 25 December), the invoices from suppliers pile up, a visit from the VAT man is imminent and the banks start to get antsy about the swelling overdrafts and feeble cash flow. Within days, the corporate [...]

A year ago I attended an informal briefing in Washington by a senior British policymaker who lamented the passing of the International Monetary Fund as an institution of any worth. Globalisation meant that bankrupt nations no longer needed IMF medicine to cure their ills. Rather, they could obtain all the finance they required from the global banking system without strings attached.

Instead of a nasty IMF able to topple governments [...]

Every few months an invitation arrives on my desk to a meet a member of the shadow cabinet at an event organised by the "Conservative City Circle". These events, held in distinctive City locations such as the Mansion House, are designed to introduce movers and shakers in the Square Mile to David Cameron, George Osborne and other senior Conservatives.

The "cocktail parties", as they are engagingly described on the group's [...]

You would have been hard-pressed to hear the words "Northern Rock" at last year's Labour conference in Bournemouth. It was the financial crisis which dared not speak its name. Yet the effort by Gordon Brown to pretend that the first mass run on a British bank since the 1860s hadn't happened is a startling metaphor for the disaster that has hit global banking and the Labour Party ever since.

Polling [...]

The narrative of Gordon Brown's ten years as chancellor looked irresistible: ten years of non-inflationary growth, the longest upturn in British economic history for 200 years, 59 quarters (which became 63) of uninterrupted growth, and so on. Brown liked kicking sand in the eyes of his critics, the City scribblers and the analysts who were so often bettered in their economic forecasts by him and the Treasury.

But out of [...]