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At a lunch attended by bankers and various City figures over the weekend, the talk turned - as it always seems to these days - to the Government and how it has lost the plot.
There was universal amazement that Alistair Darling had installed a panel of experts from the City to advise the Bank of England Governor on financial stability. Within the Square Mile, there is deep respect for Mervyn King. He's not generally seen as somebody who needs help. There's also high regard for his markets manager, Paul Tucker.
The idea that a group of us could begin to advise them, they said, was ridiculous. Even if we did, they would be fully entitled not to listen, said one, laughing. Whatever happened to the Bank's independence, asked another.
What, indeed. Cast your mind back 11 years, to the arrival of a new, young, vibrant Prime Minister and a Labour government that promised so much - even for hardened capitalists who recognised the need for change. To emphasise the point, one of its first acts was to free the Bank.
It was a brilliant stroke, one that genuinely took the breath away - that in a single audacious moment made their Tory predecessors look stultified.
As time wore on, that initial excitement was dissipated. In the end, the City grew profoundly weary of Tony Blair. But they were prepared to give his successor a chance. Gordon Brown was much admired in the City - there was wide, albeit quietly expressed, appreciation for the long period of calm he delivered as Chancellor and his rigid attachment to his fiscal rules.
Nobody liked his stealth taxes but there was a begrudging acknowledgment of his record. Not now. Since becoming Prime Minister, a series of calamities and u-turns have condemned him. But the one that encapsulates them all is the one that undoes the flair exhibited in May 1997. If Brown has one achievement to his name - and others are disappearing, fast - it was his move to release the Bank. Now, here we are, and this modern-day Grand Old Duke of York wants to undo even that.
The shock of a newspaper headline on Friday that read "City panel to oversee Bank" cannot be overestimated. "A panel of eminent City figures is to be brought in to make the Bank of England more alert to looming financial trouble and help avoid a repeat of the Northern Rock fiasco," said the story
Why? Not only, as Anthony Hilton points out, are these the people who wrought instability in the first place but what has the Bank done to deserve such interference?
It's cynical buck-passing, image-dressing politics, stupid. The spin says the Government thinks the Bank is in danger of becoming top heavy with economists and so some real City practitioners need to be drafted in.
There is a subtext here, which is that King, an economist, wants Charlie Bean, another economist, to be the Bank's next Deputy Governor for monetary policy after Rachel Lomax.
The Bank has another Deputy Governor - who oversees financial stability - in Sir John Gieve. In the Northern Rock saga, when the authorities gave every impression of freezing in the headlights of an advancing crisis, Gieve did not acquit himself well. His display in front of MPs on the inquisitorial Treasury Select Committee was desperate.
Gieve should be given his marching orders but it's not him that is going but Lomax - she is departing of her own accord to pursue other interests.
The Government would like Tucker but King, as is his wont, prefers to follow Lomax's job description and Bean looks to have got the nod. Cue mutterings from Government sources that a raft of experts is the answer to King's intransigence.
This is nonsense. What has really occurred is that nobody, absolutely nobody, predicted Northern Rock's troubles - and even if a roster of City great and good had been advising the Bank, they wouldn't have done so either.
Brown and Alistair Darling know that. But they also know that being seen to be paralysed did them enormous political harm. They don't want a repeat. They've chosen the option, straight out of the Sir Humphrey Appleby handbook of Holding on to Power Without Responsibility, of creating an outside brains trust to take the rap.
Better still, in classic Whitehall manoeuvring, they've turned the surprise of Lomax's quitting - she caught them unawares - to their advantage.
This new body is to be foisted on to King so Northern Rock looks for all the world as though it was the Bank's fault. It's cunning and it's shameful.
