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It was the late much mis-understood Labour prime minister Harold Wilson who first said that a week was a long time in politics. The crafty old devil had sussed that the templates of public adoration can shift with greater speed of loyalty of a Tammy Hall backer.

Fast forward to the events since 9 August last year and we, in the UK, along with all the other major global economies, have been in a whirlpool of ever-worsening macro-economic failure the end of which we have not seen.

Even though I still believe that we have been, and continue to, talk our selves in to a serious recession, as my old Latin master used to say it now looks as if the situation is now a posse ad esse.

Take the continuing story of two mortgage banks: Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. It is hard to imagine that after the catastrophe of Northern Rock we are more or less, in regulatory terms, back where we started. A week - it is more like a day is a long time to be face down in a financial crisis.

Ignoring for the moment the rather self-serving claims that the FSA, in a rare proactive move, had played matchmaker between Bradford & Bingley and the Texas Pacific Group in one of the most blatant and presumptuous marriages of convenience seen this side of the Khyber for a long time, there are other considerations to look at.

When shareholders gather for the former building society's extraordinary general meeting on Monday (7 July), they will have to consider three key issues: is the present board and senior executive competent to take the bank forward? Is the £179m deal with TPG, which gives the US private equity firm 23 per cent of the bank, enough of a life saver, or a sellout on the cheap? And what is the medium to long-term future of B&B?

Let us take these in order. First, is the board and senior executive team competent to take the firm forward? Even if Steven Crawshaw has already walked the plank, given his health problems, allowing Rod Kent to instal himself as executive chairman, the blood letting should not end there.

Already the predatory TPG has made it clear that it wants to clear out the present management and instal its own trusted team to return the bank to some sort of stability.

Quite clearly, to any fair-minded person, Mr Kent appeared to be asleep when he should have been in the wheelhouse as the good ship B&B negotiates those choppy waters. That alone should be the cause of putting his P45 in the post.

What about the firm’s internal management systems, its treasury and its management accounting system, which, as we have been told, was apparently weeks out of sync? Quite clearly shareholders deserve answers and TPG, even if it does not have all the right ones, does have some answers, such as replacing the operating and reporting systems.

Then there is the matter of the weekend deal orchestrated, it is alleged, by an aggressively vigilant City watchdog. Was it all it was cracked up to be?

Then finally, what is the medium to long-term future of Bradford & Bingley? We can be cynical here and say not much. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. TPG has plans to repair the bank’s muddied reputational image and to continue the business plan based on organic growth and acquisitions. Haven’t we heard this before somewhere?

The a reality is that the £400m rescue launched by Clive Cowdery, of Resolution - backed by Standard Life, L&G, Prudential and Insight - might not have been the hand of the best suitor in the pack, however, as mothers used to say, it is decent enough.

That B&B should reject it as, it is claimed, there is an unspoken grab for control, is both unsustainable and impractical. Afterall, Mr Cowdery is not a corporate philanthropist in that sense of the term, in that he goes around rescuing seriously holed business from the corporate dump heap. He is a businessman. Do they imagine that TPG has invested £179m in a limp British mortgage bank as a sign of southern generosity?

More importantly, in the eyes of the senior executive and the board, the offer from Mr Cowdery’s Resolution may not be the best out there. But, 'out there' is a black hole that runs to infinity.

Their principal duty is to put the protection of the interests of shareholders, investors, borrowers and staff far ahead of themselves. So far this does not look to be the case.

It will be interesting to see how the large institutional investors line up at Monday’s meeting.

They can either make the brave decision that Mr Kent and the rest of the board need a radical shake-up, and along with them many of the senior executive management team, or drift along hoping a better solution is around the corner.

The key underlying regulatory issue thrown up by the Northern Rock crisis has to a large extent re-appeared on the B&B space, and that is the question of assuming that banks with liquidity problems cannot be allowed to fail.

This belief is based on two myths: the notion of being too big to fail, a notion that does not apply in the manufacturing or wider service sectors; and that of the risk that bank commercial failure poses to public confidence in the wider economy.

Since the public embarrassment over the failure of the tripartite system, what we have seen is an undignified territorial battle between the Bank of England to dominate that space.

Unless chancellor Alistair Darling resolves this issue with upmost urgency there may well be more trouble waiting to reveal itself.

In the final analysis, the truth is that the present sub-prime crisis and the credit crunch are together revealing serious cracks in the fabric of the quality of management at the very commanding heights of the UK banking sect or, in general, and within the former building societies in particular.