After months of silence, the public finally heard some of Britain’s disgraced bankers say ‘sorry’ yesterday, when they gave evidence to the Treasury Select Committee Rob Merrick reports.

AFTER the South Sea bubble burst in 1721, MPs called for the reckless bankers responsible for their ruin to be tied up in snake-filled sacks and thrown into the Thames.

In Little Dorrit, Mr Merdle – the swindler whose faked savings scheme came crashing down – had the decency to commit suicide, slashing his wrists with a borrowed penknife.

Yesterday, all our modern-day bungling bankers were required to do so was say sorry for triggering the Great Crash of 2008 – but they couldn’t even do that properly.

The headlines will read that the humiliated millionaire bosses of bankrupt RBS and HBOS gave a “profound and unqualified apology”

for their calamitous mistakes, but they did nothing of the sort. Instead, we witnessed the deposed “Masters of The Univers”

express regret for the banking crash – while insisting they, too, were the innocent victims of its unforeseeable consequences.

It was as if Sir “Fred the Shred”

Goodwin, the ex- RBS chief executive, and Andy Hornby, his HBOS c o u n t e r p a r t , thought they could pop briefly into Parliament, say the ‘S’ word, then scarper back to their yachts and private jets.

If that was the advice of their expensive, private coaching –by a former News of The World editor, apparently – then they were badly ripped off. A feeling we all know well. No wonder one Labour MP on the Treasury Select Committee, after hearing 90 painful minutes of excuses, told them: “You are all in bloody denial!”

This blinkered innocence, the claim that these all-powerful financiers had merely witnessed someone else’s crime, was epitomised by one jaw-dropping statement by Mr Hornby – who, incidentally, earned £1.93m in 2007.

Asked if he felt responsible for the HBOS collapse, the former Asda wonderkid replied: “I don’t think I’m particularly, personally culpable.”

Begging the question, what exactly was he apologising for?

Mr Hornby had already claimed that, after shares nosedived, he had “lost considerably more than I have earned” – just minutes after revealing he was now trousering £60,000 per month as a consultant.

Similarly, Lord Stevenson, the former HBOS chairman, was keen to boast about its “very elaborate system of risk management and stress-testing”. Only “extreme scenarios”

prompted its failure, the MPs were told And, asked whether allowing a £160bn gap to open up between assets and liabilities might have been a tad reckless, ex-RBS chairman Sir Tom McKillop insisted it had only gone wrong because “the world changed dramatically”.

It was fate that, as Sir Tom was being roasted, RBS was announcing plans to axe up to 2,300 posts – a cull coming hard on the heels of 3,000 job cuts in October.

Even when the “ p r o f o u n d ”

apologies came, they were offered first and foremost to the shareholders of the banks they destroyed – with the wider, helpless victims of the crash mentioned last, if at all. Then came the revelations of an HBOS “head of regulatory risk”, sacked after criticising the high risk of lending money to people with “no jobs, no provable income and no assets”?

Case closed, surely? Oh, no. The HBOS chiefs claimed there was no possible connection between this stark warning of doom and the doom that quickly followed.

“It’s apples and lemons,” Lord Stevenson protested.

That prompted Labour backbencher George Mudie to ask: “Why are you the ex-chief executive and the ex-chairman if you got it right?”

And there was, mercifully, no answer to that.