Late in the afternoon of October 2, Baroness Shriti Vadera arrived at the headquarters of Standard Chartered in the City of London. The business minister, a key City fixer for Gordon Brown, was on a secret mission to draw up a plan to save the UK’s banking system.

What the participants could not have realised was that their meeting would set the agenda for a recapitalisation of the global banking sector as governments round the world copied the UK’s taxpayer-funded bail-out.