Silver fox has played blame game with PM

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Lord Turner bears some responsibility for the failure of the FSA to warn about the dangers of banking and corporate debt. But he says the real fault lies with the political class, which turned a blind eye to high risk in the City. So when he said that there was "too much fascination with finance capitalism", the poisoned arrow was aimed at the PM, whose advisers included HSBC's James Crosby and Lloyds boss Sir Victor Blank.

A graduate of Caius, Cambridge, Lord Turner is a silver fox of the City. He worked in banking as a young man (and is thus thought by some to spare bankers direct criticism). He became a director of McKinsey and headed the CBI in the mid-Nineties. Able and engaging and more outspoken than most of his ilk, he is regarded by some contemporaries as hard to pin down. One industry figure said: "Adair is very good at being where the action is and sounding very passionate about something you didn't know he cared about the week before."

In this spirit, he came to Tony Blair's attention and was given the job of heading the Pensions Commission in 2005, which brought him into conflict with Gordon Brown. In an interview with this paper Lord Turner said Mr Brown's opposition to his plan to reform the pensions system was "not a sane contribution to the argument". The then Chancellor refused to meet the pensions czar until the final week of negotiation, when Mr Blair stepped in to back the Turner reform proposals.