Face the music and dance

By the time you have read this leader, the Parliamentary ombudsman, Ann Abraham, would have once more laid the blame for the regulatory failure of Equitable Life at the hands of the government.

Those of you who have been following the coverage of this dark moment in financial regulation and the autocratic management of a leading life provider would have been familiar with our calls for the government to accept responsibility, pay compensation and move on.

Not only was the then department of trade and industry and the FSA - and it predecessor bodies - weak in the supervision of the Equitable Life by allowing a chief executive and actuary with a bullying personality to terrify them in to taking their eyes off the ball, blame must also lay at the door of the dozy non-executives and senior management who were aware that the GAR promises made by Equitable could not be met.

Since then we have had a number of crucially important events: the Institute of Actuaries has taken the necessary disciplinary steps, the FSA carried out its own internal inquiries which it declined to make public and the Scottish judge Lord Penrose wrote over 700 pages of a highly sophisticated argument laying out the awful timeline building up to the near collapse of the society.

But, it was not until Ruth Kelly, then financial secretary to the Treasury, when reporting to Parliament, tried to be, shall we say, economical with the actualite, that we had a proper picture of the way government was trying to avoid taking any responsibility.

It was left to Ros Altmann, a stalwart and first-rate public advocate – who, by the way, is not given the public recognition she deserves – that the degree of government duplicity started to unravel.

There is one morally and politically correct course for the Treasury to take and that is to accept full responsibility for the awful regulatory failure of Equitable Life and let us move on.