Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays bank, is not a man inclined to bend to the public mood. ‘There was a period of remorse and apology for banks,’ he told MPs this time last year. ‘I think that period needs to be over.’ His remarks presaged the coming confrontation between Diamond and Parliament over the Barclays bonus pool. He may think the bankers’ period of remorse and apology should be over but MPs and the public do not.
The Labour leadership, sensing a political opening, is determined to have the Barclays bonuses debated on the floor of the House. We will soon find out where this Diamond scores on the Mohs scale of hardness. Stephen Hester, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, renounced his bonus rather than have it be the subject of a vote in Parliament. Diamond is likely to face the same choice. Barclays, unlike RBS, is not majority state-owned, but it was kept going by an implicit state guarantee and it still benefits from one — or so an intellectual ally of Ed Miliband argues. That makes its behaviour an appropriate subject on which Parliament can express a view.
A few years ago a clash between a master of the universe and Parliament would have been an uneven contest. Parliament was an institution in decline, its powers draining away to the executive, Brussels and the courts. The Commons chamber even seemed at risk of ceasing to be the forum for national debate. The BBC consigned Yesterday in Parliament to the chamber of broadcasting relics, Radio 4 Long Wave, where it joined Test Match Special and The Daily Service. But rather like Test Match Special, Parliament is undergoing a period of revival, what one might term a new golden age. To be sure, there are no orators to match Pitt or Fox, but since the last election the Commons has reasserted itself.
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