Making it Happen: the staggering story of the RBS downfall

For political junkies, autumn is bringing a fix of three big books. Damian McBride’s expose of Gordon Brown has come out, Matthew d’Ancona’s inside story of the Cameron government will be serialised tomorrow. But I’ve just finished the other biggie: Iain Martin lifting the lid on RBS. Finally, Britain has an answer to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s  Too Big To Fail – except it’s set in Edinburgh rather than Manhattan, and the story is if anything even more mind-boggling. You have as much greed, ego and testosterone as there were in Wall St. But you have, thrown into the mix, the no-less-maniacal ambitions of Gordon Brown whose greed for tax revenues was as great as any banker’s greed for bonuses. And to top it off, this bizarre backdrop of Braveheart-style nationalism which spurred on Scots who thought they would show that Scotland could take on the world by creating what was, briefly, the world’s biggest bank.