Clegg to rescue the banks........

In a Government that seems bent on creating a record of crackpot notions, Nick Glegg’s brilliant scheme to ‘reward’ the taxpayers of the UK by giving them shares in the bailed-out banks is the apogee of sheer dottiness. He is clearly incapable of simple arithmetic and can’t envisage what a bonus issue of around 46 million shares would do to the market price and the banks’ values. Once we have all finished falling about, we might reflect that this person is Deputy Prime Minister.

Osborne came up with a very sound idea before the election. He proposed that the Government’s holding in RBS and Lloyds should be sold as a restricted IPO, as was the case with Maggie’s privatisations of gas, phones etc, when the shares were originally offered in small packets so that ordinary people could get a slice of the action.

But that was then, and now is now.