The wisdom of hindsight will be brought to bear with a vengeance this week on the pros and cons of demutualisation. The plight of Bradford & Bingley; the rescue bid by Lloyds TSB for HBOS, owner of Halifax; Alliance & Leicester’s disappearance into the maw of Banco Santander, which earlier absorbed the troubled former building society, Abbey – all this adds up to a sorry verdict on the wave of demutualisations that began under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

Yet before passing a devastating black and white verdict, it is worth recalling that the building societies of the pre-Thatcher era were not God’s gift to the customer. All forms of organisational ownership involve conflicts of interest. In the case of mutually-owned building societies, there was little accountability to owner-customers.