Despite HBOS chief James Crosby losing his knighthood, our banking elite remains largely impervious to retribution

First came Sir Fred of Shred, the former RBS boss who had to have both knighthood and part of his pension prised from his fingers. Yesterday was the turn of James Crosby, who volunteered for the same deal, and also lobbed in an apology for his fecklessness at HBOS. Bit by bit, the cloak of invincibility that still shrouds our disgraced banking class starts to rip. Some accountability is better than none, of course, however delayed or partial. But I can’t help feeling dissatisfied at this particular form of rough justice, which relies on one parliamentary report attracting sufficient attention from the press to catch the eye of Vince Cable – who just happens to be at a loose end during recess and looking to cause some trouble.

However improvised that chain of events sounds, it roughly describes how Crosby came to give up his gong nearly a week after a publication laid into his record at a bank which collapsed five years ago. But why should he alone take the rap, and not Andy Hornby, who replaced him as CEO in 2006 (earning £1.9m a year)? Or Lord Dennis Stevenson, who chaired the company throughout its short and calamitous life (a part-time job with a salary of £821,000)? When the failed bank finally took £20bn of taxpayer money, Stevenson argued that he should remain in post. “He was absolutely furious,” a government source told Ray Perman for Hubris: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain. “He didn’t see what he had done wrong and why he couldn’t stay.”

That executive brazenness has barely been checked since, with the trio claiming that without the meltdown on Wall Street their bank would still be upright. But as the MP Andrew Tyrie’s investigation shows, that assertion is worth about as much as a subprime mortgage on a Californian condo: by 2008, one in 10 of HBOS’s loans were bad – a higher proportion than any other big bank in Britain. These men weren’t unlucky: they were unfit to run a financial institution. The cost of their arrogance and greed will be borne by taxpayers for years. They all deserve punishment. Instead of which, Hornby is now boss of Coral the bookmakers, and Lord Stevenson has a charming portfolio career of advisory roles and trusteeships and boardroom seats. Meanwhile, the bank they used to run is now part of Lloyds Group, which is seeking to cut around 35,000 jobs.

But why stop at HBOS? Have a look at the first of our 21st-century banking failures, Northern Rock, whose former chief executive was last seen consulting to a US private equity fund. Its former chairman, Matt Ridley, writes leaders for the Times and successfully stood last year for election to the House of Lords. His shyness only appears when discussing the bank he helped drive to ruin; when this paper interviewed him in 2010, my colleague Jon Henley was forced to begin his piece thus: “Let’s get the bad news over with first: we can’t talk about Northern Rock.” That condition secured, Ridley happily plugged his latest book.

This imperviousness to retribution is the flipside of the bankers’ imperviousness to regulation; and it is borne of the same sense of untouchability. As Gordon Brown’s go-to man to chair commissions and sit on the Financial Services Authority, Crosby could easily wave away official warnings that HBOS was an “accident waiting to happen”. The collective arrogance was largely justified. The FSA has still not published a full review of what went wrong at HBOS; and its first serious publication on the fall of RBS was a one-page press release stating simply that “bad decisions” had been taken. Just as the banking elite got away with it during the boom, so they have largely got away with it in the bust.

Bank executives “have easier access to the people at the very top than the regulators have,” Mervyn King told MPs last month. This summer, he will be succeeded at the Bank of England by a former employee of Goldman Sachs.

Twitter: @chakrabortty