I had the very dubious honour of personally working for that power mad arsehole for 5 years. I was an outside contractor and was engaged by an English PR man who worked for Goodwin in Glasgow. (It was before he got the RBS job, when he was in charge of the Clydesdale Bank). I did their top end corporate stuff – Annual Reports etc.

The PR guy was, over a period of a year reduced to a gibbering wreck. Whenever I was in his office and the red phone went – it was Goodwin demanding that this guy drop everything and get to his office double quick. Quite often he would go into shock – a couple of times he actually cried. In the end, the inevitable happened and this guy just had to leave to preserve his sanity….

Goodwin acquired the title of ‘Fred the Shred’ when he was at Clydesdale because he sacked so many people. He was an utter Stalin…. bloody unbelievable. So when I heard about their problems – and saw his grovelling apology for the first half yearly figures a couple of months ago, I couldn’t help smiling….

But with all this spivvery going on, surely, surely these so called banking geniuses should be held to account?

with HBOS, they all metamorphed into HBOS

NatWest still very much exists. It’s now part of RBS group but its brand is so much stronger than RBS. I couldn’t tell you, without looking it up, whether there is an RBS branch in Telford or where it is if there is one. You just don’t see many of them around but NatWest is everywhere. I think the only place they’ve successfully rebranded is with a logo change for Ulster Bank from a bastardised NatWest logo to a bastardised RBS one.

Do Nat west not exist anymore?

The HBOS assimilation was not so bad, you can still tell which branches were BOS and which Halifax, certainly up here you can.