Peter Burt once claimed that his ambition had been to “make banking boring” — and in this he probably failed. While chief executive of the Bank of Scotland he made an audacious though unsuccessful bid to take over NatWest, wooed Abbey National in what one report called a “bungled courtship”, and eventually merged the Bank of Scotland with Halifax, the former building society, to form HBOS in a deal worth £30 billion.
His most colourful move was a flirtation with Pat Robertson, the American right-wing televangelist, whom he tried to sign up to a joint venture selling the bank’s savings and loan products to Robertson’s 55 million viewers. The flaw emerged when Robertson’s offensive fundamentalism manifested itself in a vile, homophobic rant against Scotland as