Today’s speech will no doubt include a section about how he for many years had, with great insight, been calling for global financial regulation. His speech in 2005 to the CBI however was pure New Labour neo-liberalism, praising enterprise, free markets and globalisation. He promised the corporate class deregulation, a “new risk based model of regulation” for financial services

“no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch.”

So there was no risk-based reason to clamp down on Northern Rock?

“But the real prize for memory loss must go to Ed Balls. On Monday he said that those who had advocated “light touch regulation” had been, in his words, “routed”. This is the same Ed Balls who as Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury for eight years boasted about the “light touch” regime of City regulation he had designed. This is also the same Ed Balls who then as City Minister called for “a light touch approach at the global and EU level”. The star player of Labour’s football team has scored a spectacular own-goal.”