It’s time for Hammond to send a ruthless hit squad into RBS

The new series of The Missing is surely the gloomiest television of the year. But it has nothing on the endless saga of RBS, which seems to use the same disturbing time-shift device: whenever there’s a horrible new plot twist, you have to spot whether we’re in 2008, 2011 or today.

The crippled bank, still 73 per cent state-owned, has lost £2.5 billion in the first three quarters of this year, having just paid out another £425 million in ‘litigation and conduct’ costs chiefly relating to mortgage-backed securities hanky-panky in the US. Since its bailout eight years ago, it has lost considerably more than the £46 billion of taxpayers’ money that was pumped into it, and has never reported a full-year profit. Attempts by chief executive Ross-McEwan, after three years in post, to persuade analysts to focus on the bank’s positive underlying performance, rather than the extraordinary charges that are the legacy of his cursed predecessor-but-one Fred-Goodwin, fall quarterly on stony ground.

The harsh truth is this: if ever there was a company that cried out to be broken up, its operating business either sold to the highest bidder or if unsellable then parked in a ‘bad bank’ to be gradually wound down, RBS is surely it. The parent brand deserves to be buried forever, even if the main subsidiary brands of NatWest and Coutts are still viable and the original Scottish branch network might have a new life under a new (or old) name. But the one serious attempt to sell off a significant piece of the group — the separation of 314 branches into a ‘challenger bank’ under the revived and well-respected name of Williams & Glyn — has turned into the biggest cock-up of all.

The disposal was insisted upon by competition officials in Brussels, to be done by 31 December next year as a condition of the 2008 bailout.