Whatever happened to the robber hero? The suited and booted thieves who coolly walked out of Graff jewellers in Mayfair with £40m of gemstones, may have caught the headlines. But they are unlikely to achieve the Public Hero No 1 cult status of a serial thief. As Ronnie Biggs, Great Train Robber, was let out of prison in the same week as the release of a film on Jacques Mesrine, French gangster-robber-turned-folk-hero, soon after a biopic of John Dillinger, it was a reminder of how times have changed.

For a start, hold-ups aren’t as attractive as they used to be. Crime statistics reveal a surprising trend. A look at the latest Federal Bureau of Investigation figures shows bank robberies are down in the past year (British crime surveys do not track bank jobs). In the US, the number of bank heists at the start of 2009 fell 6.6 per cent from the previous year. It is a depressing comment on the financial system when even robbers have lost confidence in the banks.