Quango - What Do You Have to Do to Lose a Knighthood?

It is July 2012. Tuesday afternoon. Sir Fred Goodwin is sat before his alabaster coffee table in his Edinburgh living room, clicking through his Sky+, looking for the golf highlights he thought he'd taped but now has no idea whether they're still there or not. “Fucking thing doesn't work,” he curses.

The post falls through the letterbox, onto the mat he was given as a leaving present from RBS. The one that reads: “WELCOME. NOW FUCK OFF.” Bored out of his tiny master of the universe mind, Fred trudges over to open it, in search of stimulation. He picks the one with the red embossed Royal seal first, reeling visibly as its contents unfold to him.

“Sir Fred,” it says. “Or should we say: Fred. Remember that knighthood we gave you? Well we, the Forfeiture Committee, have hereby decided that you don't deserve it. So we're taking it back. The Queen will un-knight you in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace later this year. Ta-ra.”

“Fucking hell,” he intones to no one. “I had literally no idea people were upset about all that bother. I mean, I thought the daily public flayings in the tabloids were meant as a joke. But I guess they've really shown me they're serious now.”

Fred goes to the kitchen, pours himself another glass of M&S Organic Blueberry Smoothie and heads for his study, where he turns on his computer monitor, opens MyCV.doc, and wearily erases the word 'Sir' from the header.

Snap back to reality. It's January 2012. Underneath his Top Gear duvet cover, Sir Fred awakes from this poisonous dream, starts for a moment, then sinks contentedly back to sleep. None of this, he realises, is ever going to happen.

This is despite the fact that David Cameron, who is developing a nasty penchant for this sort of showboating, announced last week that he was going to refer Sir Fred to Whitehall's own gong-removal jury, the Forfeiture Committee. To get a sense of the effectiveness of this body, you only need look at their track record. It took them seven years to decide that people shouldn't go around calling Robert Mugabe 'Sir', and by that point, he'd done loads of genocides. Convicted perjurer Jeffrey Archer is still Lord. As is Lord Watson of Invergowie: a man who, in 2004, set fire to the curtains of a hotel lobby in a drunken act of serious vandalism that hasn't stopped him from voting on the laws that you and I are made to uphold. Ian McKellen made X-Men: The Last Stand, yet he still has the balls to call himself a knight of the realm. And the less said about Sir Mix-A-Lot and his criminal records the better.

Sure, we all know Fred likes adultery. And super-injunctions to protect him from the consequences of adultery. And that he got drunk, bet everything on 'black' and sunk the British economy. And that he enjoys sending emails to staff headed 'Rogue Biscuits', excoriating them for displaying pink wafer biscuits among the executive biscuit selection. But being a player and a bully and a sweary-Mary are not against the law.

The fact that the law applies universally, not just to people we dislike, is something Britain's political leaders have seldom had the courage to tell their notoriously thick electorate. So instead they puff their cheeks and come up with distracting flim-flammery. Cameron's meaningless referral to a committee with an ironclad duty to do nothing was timed to coincide with the new round of RBS bonus distributions. New RBS chair Stephen Hessler will probably be awarded £1.5million for leading his company to a 45 percent decline in its share price. The total bonus pool is £14billion: a shade over £200 for every man, woman and child in Britain. All of which Cameron can do a shade over nothing about without effectively declaring martial law.

The problem the Coalition face is that we live in a free country. Except, when you say it like that, it doesn't sound like a problem. To chime with public opinion, you have to say 'evil bankers are entering into valid contracts while being evil in a free country'.

Sir Fred knows what he did was bad. But do we, the public, actually understand what he did? We're upset because it turned out we were all much poorer than we thought we were, not because there was a big pile of money which Sir Fred put in a sack and scarpered to the hills with. It was a bubble, not The Great Train Robbery. Perhaps 2012 is the year we look in the mirror and start moving our grieving process for our missing money from outward blame to inward guilt, in the hope that one day we'll chug our way towards acceptance.

@HurtGavinHaynes

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - Yacht Rock Anthem