Brown hasn’t got much left to throw at the market

The Prime Minister’s latest measures to shore up the banking sector will not be his last, says Martin Vander Weyer. But the market is losing patience with the government’s interventions

There is a passage in The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell’s novel about the Indian Mutiny, in which the defenders of the British residency, having exhausted conventional munitions, load their remaining cannon with anything sharp-edged that comes to hand. In a scene of surreal carnage, a last wave of mutinous sepoys are then mown down by a volley of fish knives, sugar tongs and marble fragments chipped from an allegorical statue called ‘The Spirit of Science’ — which had hitherto symbolised the senior British officers’ attachment to rationalism.

That seems to be roughly the point we have reached in the siege of the British banking system. Except that we have no way of knowing whether this week’s desperate package of additional measures will turn out to have been a decisive improvisation by Captain Brown and Corporal Darling — who clearly abandoned rationalism some months ago — or a futile gesture before their mutinous foe overwhelm them.