We must play the blame game over HBOS. How else will bankers learn?

‘Everyone remembers the names of Applegarth of Northern Rock and Goodwin of RBS, but history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot,’ I wrote four years ago. Judgment has arrived at last in a Bank of England report on the 2008 HBOS collapse — plus a second report, by Andrew Green QC, on the adequacy of investigations by the now-defunct Financial Services Authority.

The Bank does not go as far as I did with ‘worst of the lot’. But there’s a hint that way in deputy governor Andrew Bailey’s foreword, which calls this ‘a story of the failure of a bank that did not undertake complicated activity or so-called racy investment banking: HBOS was at root a simple bank…’ By that he means a bank built, both in the former Halifax building society and in the Bank of Scotland, on age-old principles of prudent lending against bricks and mortar.