After the Lord Mayor’s show comes . . . Northern Rock. In the wake of Barclays and HSBC, the mortgage lender leads a bedraggled procession of banks hauling trailers full of Britain’s smelliest loans. Like the proverbial muck-cart, the Rock’s half-year balance sheet – and Lloyds’ and Royal Bank of Scotland’s, to be published today and Friday – should remind stronger peers and their critics that UK retail banks have not yet returned to rude health. They surely won’t until house prices, unemployment rates and the overall economy bottom out.

For Barclays’ John Varley or HSBC’s Stephen Green, humility is the new arrogance. But it is easy to wring your hands about the “humbling experience” of the crisis when your bet on investment banking shields you from the worst. If it’s humble you’re after, think rather of ex-directors and managers of Northern Rock, who punted the bank’s future on risky mortgages still putrefying on its balance sheet years later. Their legacy was apparent on Tuesday in the vast loan loss impairment charges, the steadily worsening figures for arrears over three months, and continued heavy losses.