The Making of 'Making It Happen'

The slogan that Fred Goodwin chose to market RBS in the boom years was: “Make It Happen”. The bank he ran certainly helped make it happen, although not quite in the way that he and his colleagues intended.

They built Royal Bank of Scotland - previously a modest, careful institution that was capable of innovation but sober with it - into the biggest bank in the world. Its balance sheet (total assets) was £1.9 trillion pounds by the time the financial crisis hit. That was a sum bigger than the entire output of the UK economy. In under a decade RBS became a vast international bank, which meant that if it got into severe difficulties it was going to cost an enormous amount to rescue it. Five years ago this month, the British taxpayer stumped up £45.2bn and ended up owning 82% of RBS. Many hundreds of billions of pounds more was needed to rescue the UK's other banks, and to provide emergency loans so they could still function. But RBS was the biggest British bank of the lot and it needed the most rescuing. 

I became fascinated by what had gone wrong at the bank Goodwin ran, and so two and half years ago began the research and writing that produced my book, Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the men who blew up the British economy.

At its heart is an extraordinary human story of hubris, pride and ambition unrestrained. But I also wanted to go wider than Goodwin and his management team at RBS. The causes of the failure were widespread. The board of RBS, the regulators, auditors, shareholders and politicians all failed. Indeed, the reckless rise of RBS happened while the then Chancellor Gordon Brown was proclaiming the end of boom and bust. That boast set the tone for an era in which bonus-hungry bankers and many consumers became convinced that it was fine to load up with epic amounts of debt because those in positions of authority said the good times would not end.

In the autumn of 2008 I watched it all come crashing down. Then I was an executive on the Telegraph, the paper I still write for. I was running the comment section of the newspaper and its website, and on the rota to duty-edit the Sunday for Monday edition of the paper. Each weekend seemed to bring fresh hitherto unimaginable disaster that portended an economic catastrophe.

I was duty-editing at The Daily Telegraph on the Sunday evening in September when it became apparent that Lehman Brothers was not going to be rescued. It was going bust in the morning.

A few weeks later, on Tuesday the 7th of October 2008, I stood with colleagues and watched as the RBS share price fell like a stone, its course charted as a red line sloping steeply downwards on the large TV screens that peppered the newsroom. The inside story of that day - involving Goodwin, RBS chairman Sir Tom McKillop, the Chancellor, the Prime Minister, Britain’s other bank chief executives, the Bank of England and the team at the Treasury all battling to avert total collapse - is recounted in Chapter One of Making It Happen.

The following weekend I was on duty, as the government finalised the rescue of the banking system on the Sunday evening. The next morning the headlines on page 1 told of an epic rescue that would cost the taxpayer very dear.

Five years on, I wanted to try and capture the mad intensity of that period while telling the whole story as fairly as possible. And I wanted to find out what the hell those involved thought they were doing in the long run-up to disaster.