Dithering? Nah, couldn’t be…

Yesterday, I suspected that Alistair Darling’s obfuscating language meant that HMT didn’t really have a clue about how to deal with the market turmoil. But the hope was that, behind the confused – and confusing – rhetoric, there lay substantive action.

It would seem not, if the reports of the Chancellor’s meeting with bank officials last night are anything to go by. As Robert Peston outlined on Today this morning, the banks are said to have left infuriated by the lack of any clear plan from the Government. While HMT discovered for the first time that the banks aren’t “too proud” to accept recapitalisation.

It’s an astonishing set-up – that, for all the meetings with world leaders, all the economic councils and all the talk of “whatever it takes”, the Government seems only now to be catching onto the banks’ wishes, and seems not to have come up with a fully-workable plan in the meantime.