A speech like no other

It’s the Mansion House speech tonight, and it comes on a day when unemployment numbers on the claimant count went up by much less than expected.

The chancellor himself is the most high profile example of this. Just a fortnight ago, his own team were unsure as to whether he would be delivering tonight’s landmark speech to City grandees.

Now this will be a Mansion House speech like no other. None of the eulogies, promises of light touch regulation, and all-round toadying tone of previous Mansion House speeches. He will say: “Anyone who thinks that we can carry on as if nothing has happened should think again. In every country we are paying a huge price for this crisis. Not just the financial cost, but also a profound social and human cost.”

The shift in tone is a reflection of the reality that 45 per cent of mortgage lending is done by subsidiaries of the UK state bank holding company. Indeed the change of tone will be aided by the fact that many of the audience are now fellow state employees.

This morning’s employment statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that public sector employment surged by over 252,000 in the six months to March, (at the same time the private sector shed 521,000 jobs).

This state job frenzy is actually down to the classification of RBS and Lloyds as public sector.

So the black-tied employees of Coutts, Natwest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Halifax, TSB, and Northern Rock will be listening intently not just to an interfering politician, but at some level, their boss.