Your three-point guide to today’s RBS report

After months of delay, and much hounding by The Spectator’s Select Committee Chairman of the Year, Andrew Tyrie, the Financial Services Authority has finally released its report into the wheezing collapse of RBS in 2008. At 452 pages it is a behemoth of a document, and too much for me to have fully digested yet. But a few points stand out at first glance:

1) Don’t blame us, blame Gordon. The Tories are making much of the fact that only three politicians are mentioned in the report: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and, most relevantly, Ed Balls. And they’re not mentioned in a particularly flattering context, either. All three are quoted to partially justify the FSA’s regulatory approach in the run-up to the RBS debacle. You’ve probably heard the quotations before — Brown’s ‘Not just a light touch but a limited touch’; Balls’s ‘nothing should be done to put at risk a light-touch, risk-based regulatory regime’; and so on — but they’re outside their usual setting of a speech by a Tory minister.