Step forward the Shareholder Executive. Created in 2003 to improve the financial performance of public sector businesses that governments might one day privatise, it was hardly set up to preside over the commanding heights of the UK economy. But that, ironically, may well be its fate, assuming the government’s offer to pump £50bn of equity into British banks finds takers among the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and Barclays. This little-known corner of Whitehall, charged with overseeing a motley portfolio of 29 companies, including nuclear group Urenco, the Met Office, the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Mail, the Tote and Channel 4, could morph into something similar to the highly political state holding companies that sprang up in continental Europe.

Think, for example, of Italy’s Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, or France’s Consortium de Réalisation, the “bad bank” created to warehouse the wreckage of Crédit Lyonnais, the state-owned giant that failed in the early 1990s.