Lord Turner’s recent remarks (first made in Prospect magazine) about “socially useless” financial innovation may have cost him a few friends. Perhaps a good regulator – he is chairman of the Financial Services Authority – should have a prickly relationship with the industry he is scrutinising. But he returned to his theme in front of a City audience at the Lord Mayor’s banquet last week, provoking some heckling at the time and rather more harrumphing after he had finished speaking.

Some guests found parts of Lord Turner’s text hard to swallow. At one point, he blamed our economic difficulties on a crisis “whose origins lay in the financial system, a crisis cooked up in trading rooms where not just a few but many people earned annual bonuses equal to a lifetime’s earnings of some of those now suffering the consequences”. We cannot go back, Lord Turner declared, to business as usual.