Sir Peter Burt is back, but the soundbites haven't changed. The former Bank of Scotland chief executive always presented himself as an old-school banker, one of solid virtue and simple tastes who unfussily got on with the tedious business of scrimping money.

"Banking should be boring," he proclaimed back in 1999, even as he launched a bold £21 billion takeover bid for NatWest, the most interesting event in banking for years.

By Burt's telling, his management strategy was dull - he turned the lights off at the close of business, sometimes finding 50p on the floor, which he would set against the next rainy day.

The reality was different. The Bank of Scotland he built was racy for the time, moving strongly into private equity and small-business banking - risky ventures both.

His bid to take over NatWest was scooped by a rival offer from Royal Bank of Scotland, and later he had to sell BoS to what was then Halifax.

It was presented as a merger, but it was a takeover in all but name. Bank of Scotland - this may sound familiar - was in urgent need of capital, and sought safety in the arms of a more secure company.

One stat makes the point: when the deal to create HBOS was unveiled, Halifax was almost 85% self-funded - that is, for every £1 out on loan, it held 85p in deposits. For Bank of Scotland, the ratio was just 53p to the pound - leaving it, like Northern Rock, desperately reliant on the wholesale funding markets to stay alive.

Burt and his supposedly boring banking made a return at the weekend, as he and one-time enemy Sir George Mathewson set about trying to wreck the HBOS-Lloyds merger. Sympathetic interviews followed - the adults were back in town.

Their proposal is this: ditch the deal, sack the HBOS chairman and chief executive and let us run the show. This is certainly audacious, as if the pair of them had nothing to do with the present banking crisis - old hands who could be trusted to steady the ship.

Mathewson is the man who hired the now-reviled Sir Fred Goodwin to lead RBS, setting it on its course to disaster. He showed his appreciation for how the other half live in 2001 when he dismissed a £750,000 bonus as being not enough to "give bragging rights in a Soho wine bar", which prompted anger from some and bemusement about where he went drinking from others.

Burt, you may remember, once tried to enter into a telephone-banking joint venture with US TV evangelist Pat Robertson. This had to be abandoned after Robertson described Scotland as a "dark land" overrun by homosexuals. It wouldn't have taken much due diligence to see that Robertson was a wild risk - far from boring, anyway - but apparently Burt didn't do any.

In 2004, Burt tipped up as chairman of ITV, prompting a seasoned City commentator to remark that "Peter Burt could probably write what he knows about mass-market TV on the back of a postage stamp". It hard to see how even Burt can claim his chairmanship of ITV was a success - the company remains in dire straits.

The case that these are the right men to manage an HBOS shorn of the Lloyds protection in a brutal credit crunch seems hard to make.These are difficult times requiring sureness of touch, sensitivity to the Government's attempts to manage a crisis and an awareness of public relations.

Mathewson is now chairman of Tosca, a hedge fund that has lost billions on bad bets in the property sector. Old hands they may be, but safe hands?

Teaching an Old Mut new tricks

Old Mutual may need a miracle, but it has settled for Philip Broadley.

The former finance director of the Prudential pitched up at the embattled insurer last week to a mixed response from the City.

When Broadley left the Pru more than a year ago, it was for unexplained reasons. Some had it that chief executive Mark Tucker wanted rid of him for ages, but he'd fired so many other top executives already that he held on to Broadley for a while longer.

Others insisted that Broadley was highly respected in the City, and that the standard quote in the press release at the time, claiming "it is the right time to look for a fresh challenge", might even have been true.

Broadley's record at the Pru was patchy - he oversaw a cut in the dividend and a rights issue that angered investors, but he left the business in a solid position once these issues were worked through.

Now he has a massive job on his hands as chief financial officer at Old Mut, which has been the dog of the insurance sector for years.

It seems to find cunning new ways to lose money every few months, as one or other of its disparate businesses around the world springs a leak.

Analysts say they have concerns about the company's lack of disclosure, its capital adequacy, likely dividend cuts and a possible refinancing risk.

So at least Broadley won't be bored, looking for things to do.

A note from Cazenove's James Pearce has the Broadley appointment as "a deliciously unexpected turn of events" that is "one for the sector connoisseur". Somehow, that doesn't read like a ringing endorsement.

Broadley has much work ahead of him.

So far, the cat's doing £38 better than the Bat

One week into a six-month contest is no time to leap to conclusions. Especially when that competition is a slightly frivolous scheme pitching a well-known stockbroker - Jeremy Batstone-Carr of Charles Stanley - against a cat and a mattress (the Bat versus the cat versus the mat, someone said).

Batstone-Carr, who forfeits a surname if he comes last, picked five stocks to do well over the period, with £1000 going into each share. The Evening Standard Business desk picked five of its own and the office cat pawed its way around the FT, choosing milk-maker Dairy Crest - a disaster so far - as one of his five. The mattress carries a fire risk, but otherwise the £5000 it covers is safe.

Investing is a long-term game, and even judging Charles Stanley's tips over six months might be regarded as harsh. So it would be quite unfair to point out that so far the stockbroker is the only player to have lost money, with the cat nudging ahead of the mattress and the Standard team's tips roaring up.

Printing a league table of the standings thus far would be gratuitous.

ES Business: £5301
Cat: £5004
Mattress: £5000
Jeremy Batstone-Carr: £4966

Bat's picks: Glaxo, Vodafone, BAT, Sainsbury's, BHP Billiton.

Cat's picks: BG Group, Eurasian Natural Resources, Dairy Crest, Charter, Rio Tinto.

ES picks: Ryanair, Aviva, Begbies Traynor, BP, Imperial Tobacco.

The sobering thoughts of a beer guide

Beer and quirky numbers are a great combination. Which makes the just-published 2008 Statistical Handbook of the British Beer & Pub Association an excellent read.

If you want to know who are the drunkest people in Europe (the Czechs) or the price of a pint of bitter in 1971 (12p), this is the place.

Government revenue from alcohol is now towards £15 billion a year - but that's just 3.7% of its total tax take, down from the 7.5% it was getting in 1976.

The notion that we are a nation of out-of-control binge drinkers also takes a hit. We drink a bit more than we did 30 years ago, but it's not staggering -11.2 litres of pure alcohol each a year, up from 9.4 litres in 1978.

Other numbers require a little more context.

There were, it says, 79,004 drunk offenders in England and Wales in 1970. In 2006 this was down to 21,511. This was "partially due to the use of fixed penalty notices", the handbook advises, but further info is needed.

Can it really be true that there is less fighting in bars than there used to be?

Email simon.english@standard.co.uk