Derek Wanless is Gordon Brown’s most trusted banker. When Gordon wanted a plan for the NHS billions, he called in Derek Wanless. It was the 2002 Wanless report, the Health Trends Review, which provided the intellectual framework for the billions poured into the NHS. Gordon liked what he heard so much, he asked him to produce two further reports.

Sir Derek sits, like so many other of New Labour’s great and the good, on various government quangos; the Statistics Commission and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

More importantly he chairs Northern Rock’s Risk and Audit committees. If anyone should have known what was coming, it was Gordon’s favourite banker. He had to sign off on all strategic risk management issues. When Northern Rock realised the game was up, do you think it might have been Derek who was deputised to call his old political ally, Gordon Brown, for the bail-out?