Now we're all between the Rock and a hard place

Now that the Bank of England is lending the effectively bankrupt building society the equivalent of the entire primary school budget and may soon be lending it the equivalent of the defence budget, it is easy to understand why a horrified public feels its taxes are vanishing down a north-eastern plughole.

But maybe there is self-hatred in the anger as well as righteous indignation. For if you were looking for an embodiment of modern folly, you would be hard pressed to find a better reflection of British society than Northern Rock.

You will remember Adam Applegarth, its chief executive, was acclaimed as a financial dynamo for borrowing from the money markets rather than sticking to the boring method of first attracting savers' deposits and then granting mortgages to home buyers. He "borrowed short and lent long", as the bankers put it, and that was his undoing when the credit market crunched.

I know there are many readers who live within their means, by necessity as much as anything else. But consumer debt stands at £1.35 trillion - higher than the country's gross domestic product - because millions of others have been Applegarth's-mirror image. A lot of us have borrowed long and spent short. We've taken out mortgages that must be paid back over decades for transient holidays and consumer sprees, then kept the shopping going by rolling over interminable credit card bills from one company to the next.

Gordon Brown is a good hater, possibly the best in public life, and he must feel he has the right to loathe Applegarth for shredding Labour's reputation for economic competence.

Then again, wasn't Brown once praised for his willingness to impose only "light touch" regulation on booming banks such as Northern Rock? So light was his touch that the Government couldn't lay a glove on its directors until it was too late. Friends in the City told me months ago that whenever they fired an incompetent colleague, they never felt guilty because they knew he could always get a job with the Financial Services Authority.

And when it came to government debt, Brown was the Applegarth of the Treasury. He kept the private finance initiative off the books with Enron-style accounting and borrowed like there was no tomorrow to fund his social projects. If there is a recession, we may regret that New Labour didn't put money aside in case of hard times; that like some credit-crazed consumer, it assumed the good times would always roll.

So, no, it won't do and I won't have it. Adam Applegarth isn't a pariah. He is the king of our Never-Never Land. From the corridors of the Treasury to the aisles of the supermarkets we are all Applegarths now.