The next Archbishop of Canterbury expressed astonishment yesterday that the Bank of Scotland ever became a risky lender, revealing that his attempts to get money out of the bank in the Eighties were like “screwing blood out of a stone”.
Justin Welby, the Bishop of Durham, was asking Andy Hornby, the chief executive of HBOS at the point of its forced sale to Lloyds, why the culture of the bank had changed so radically.
Mr Hornby said that different divisions of the bank always had different cultures, he defended its risk management structures and told the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards that the collapse of HBOS had been caused by a seizure of wholesale market funding that nobody had foreseen.
The Bishop told the banking