If you don’t want to be treated as crooks, stop mugging your high-street customers here please

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone cash bonuses for 2009 despite record profits of £11.6 billion. No, my acquaintance will certainly have shared in the Barclays Capital bonus-pot, so he should be feeling more like a Euro-lottery winner than a prisoner in the stocks. But the token self-restraint of his bosses will do little to deflect the argument, put by Vince Cable and others, that whether or not they were directly bailed out, banks like Barclays only came through the 2008 crisis intact thanks to government and central-bank interventions, and are now raking in ‘excess’ profits on the back of low interest rates and implicit state guarantees — so they should pay heavily for the privilege.

The one thing I believe would assuage the hostility behind that argument is a return to domestic lending as usual. Barclays says that ‘gross new lending to UK households and businesses last year totalled some £35 billion’, against a pledge of only £11 billion, but anecdotal evidence suggests — and this is a perpetual peril of banking, in good times as well as bad — that managers down the line haven’t been reading head office’s instructions. I hear too many tales of longstanding small-business customers being whacked with punitive extra charges or suddenly told their credit lines have been slashed. Until that issue is addressed, the British public will continue to regard bankers as no better than high-street muggers.

Native genius

A memorable moment in my stint as a Daily Telegraph leader writer came on 15 July 1997 when the editorial conference was interrupted by the news that Gianni Versace had been shot dead on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion.