Lightning rod

At last. A banker we can finally get at.

OK, so he is a rather portly lightning rod and certainly doesn't look like the kind of thing you'd really want strapped to your chimney. But the unfortunate Rev Paul Flowers, lately of the Ethical Bank, seems perfectly suited for the job.

He has it all. Incompetence. Shady political connections. Indiscretion. (Let's be generous and call it that.) A religious carapace (perfecto mondo !). And not only that, but as a riotously inept and apparently inexperienced top banker, he was also keen on the fast lane. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, maybe without so much of the musical element.

And he has even been arrested, rather than laden with a freight of honours and plaudits. Unusual for a banker.

And why ? 

Not because the Ethical Bank has hideously betrayed and let down those who (like me) have been naively trusting customers for decades. No, nothing fiscal. Nothing about dodgy dealings and false prospectuses (pospecti ?). Nothing about the bungling dishonesty which has wrecked, yes - wrecked, a bank.

No, drugs. With lots of excitable public disapproval about the sex to garnish the arrest.

Rev Paul Flowers isn't the first banker to adopt a hedonistic life-style. Not even the first reverend. He is just a little unfortunate in having so easily excited our collective prurience, sniffy disapproval, and visceral hatred of the professional that in a decent society would not dare to speak its name.

So although this feels as if the huge animosity towards bankers has finally caught up with a straggler, in fact it hasn't, and the whole damn herd has happily moved on to new pastures, doing what bankers do. And what bankers do (besides seeking out exotic coke-uninhibited sex, which I guess is a pretty normal and eminently affordable hobby for bankers) is to hoover up money from whosoever is daft enough to become a victim, which seems to be most of us.

Ho hum.