Hoist by their own retard...

Does anyone - least of all any Nu Labour politician - actually believe the efflux of blame and non-sequitur spouted by Gordon Brown and his divinely appointed spokesdrell, Harriet Harman? She was at it again this weekend, this time on the Andrew Marr show.

People, she observed, were appalled at the pension deal taken by evil RBS chair Fred the Shred. Something would be done.

Lets put aside, for a moment, the sheer size of the guy's pay-off. Its big. Its bloody enormous! But its not entirely at odds with the sort of deals that have been going down in the teeth of absolutely no public outrage at all whilst times were good.

However, this bad man has presided over the destruction of one of the UK's oldest, proudest (insert clichéd epithet to taste) UK banks. He should pay: and what better way to make him pay than to separate him from something that he dearly loves. Like his wallet.

The logic behind this game of political pass-the-parcel seems to be: ignore what went before. Ignore the success. Ignore the fact that this particular success was really built on jello. Let's all just blame the guy holding the package when the bills come in.

Wouldn't it be lovely if this rhetoric eventually returned to bite Ms Harman on the bum! (Not a pretty image, I'll grant you). Her argument boils down to the simplistic: "it is wrong that a person at the helm of a major bank whilst the banking system lost its trousers should in any way benefit from their actions. The public will not stand for it".

Indeed. Its an unfair world. But if Ms Harman is not careful, the public might actually put two and two together and start asking whether a man who was at the helm of the state's finances during the, um, de-trousering of the banking system should in any way benefit from his position.

Perhaps, when she has finished looking into retrospective legislation that could be applied to bankers, she will cast her beady eye over penalties that could be levied on Chancellors that get things wrong.

She wouldn't even need a new Act of Parliament. Just dust down the laws on high treason and hey presto: its Gordon for the Tower!