Kingman apparently found the public sector more “fun”, but yachts and early retirement are also “fun”, so the move is understandable. The rest of the UKFI gang had come from lucrative careers in the private sector, before doing some public time to buff their legacy; Kingman has almost always been a civil servant, so we probably shouldn’t be too hard on him wanting to make a pot of money at this point in his career. Still, you might have thought he’d at least wait until Northern Rock was released back into the wild; they’ve been courting smaller banks like Virgin Money in order to broaden the competition in the now very small world of high street banking, but any deal is miles away from being settled. Vince Cable said yesterday: “His departure at this time will leave a massive hole.”

At the same time as Kingman leaving, UKFI finally appointed a chairman in the form of Sir David Cooksey, who takes over from acting chairman Glen Moreno, who’s ended up being in the job for six months. Cooksey is a UK business legend, founder of £500m-strong venture capital unit Advent, and a director at places like the Wellcome Trust, London and Continental Railways, and ENRC. Again, he’s not taking the position for the money – his salary is just £100,000.

The difficulty for him now is the political sensitivity of hiring the next chief exec. The candidate is likely to come from the private sector, like a bank or hedge fund, given Cooksey’s relative lack of banking experience, but such a person would need to take a huge wage cut if their salary was to match Kingman’s. Being UKFI chief exec next year is a rather thankless task, negotiating around a general election and a potential power shift, as well as applying ongoing pressure on banks to provide credit while keeping out of their affairs as the UKFI has said it must. So a private-sector-sourced chief exec will demand more money; expect indignant headlines and political point-scoring over the perceived lack of value that UKFI is providing the taxpayer by paying higher wages.

Equally hard is the conundrum of where to source the post from. would any former banker be able to do anything but act punitively towards his former peers without accusations of backscratching and nepotism? If a banker wasn’t chosen though, the appointment would be open to accusations of irrelevance and lack of experience. Wanted: formerly well-paid person for task that will prove impossible to please everyone with. Any takers?

First, the bad – structurally, the new order is as open, if not more so, to the kind of infighting and barriers to progress that it was before. The tripartite system, with responsibility being shared between the Treasury, the Bank of England, and the Financial Services Authority (FSA), managed to ignore each others recommendations throughout the period of rampant overleverage and negative equity lending and the like, but it’s being kept. There’s a new Council for Financial Stability, where the heads of the three bodies will meet to discuss crucial issues, though they actually already do that in a standing committee in the Commons, so how much that can be relied upon to effect change is pretty debatable. The hope is that the increased transparency of the Council will prevent ideas being dismissed without proper debate – the danger here is obviously the opportunity for electioneering and political point-scoring, as well as interminable squabbling.

Surely it would be better to beef up the FSA, and have it solely responsible for carrying out regulation, leaving the Bank to its historic role and the Treasury to form policy? As it is, the system is open to the kind of spats we’ve seen between the bodies recently; indeed, it could be said that Mervyn King has been kicking up a fuss merely to highlight these weaknesses of the tripartite system, and thus staking his claim for the Bank to wield much of the power. Though Darling claimed yesterday that the Bank didn’t want to become a banking regulator: “That is not a power that the Bank is seeking at the moment”.

But while the balance of power looks set to continue see-sawing, the actual proposals in the white paper look sober and sound. There was more faith in maintaining high capital levels in banks, though again the actual levels were not set in stone; there are also heartening (yet equally vague) gestures towards preventing boom and bust cycles in the economy.

Banks themselves will be pleased with the decision not to split investment and retail branches of major banks, though the current bubble, with a handful of banks holding much of the assets and generating huge profits from them, looks set to burst and the government demands more competition in the sector (the doling out of Northern Rock assets will be one of the first steps in this process). The banks will not be happy with the proposal that they maintain a pool of cash for paying back depositors who stand to lose money if their bank fails – they argue that having this pool, rather than allotting government funds when the time comes, is expensive, inefficient, and that governments would need to spend bailout money anyway. They may have a point – this can be seen as a bit of a votes-winning exercise, to show how in thrall Labour is to its people rather than to bankers, rather than a truly effective way of dealing with times of crisis. Nevertheless, it at least toes Labour’s prudential line.

The opposition parties have been quick to attack –  George Osbourne going after the tripartite system, saying that a Tory government would hand powers over to the Bank, and create a consumer watchdog in place of the FSA; Vince Cable going after the lack of a proper pay cap in the City – “There will be champagne corks popping all over the City this afternoon – the Chancellor’s statement proves that it really is business as usual.”

This kind of beef is inevitable, and the point of a white paper is to have the details filled in over the forthcoming weeks. The proposals are sound – let’s hope they can find a path through the system into being.

Peston was blamed for the queues outside Northern Rock after he revealed the bank’s woes to the nation, as well as for the rise in HBOS’s share price after Peston revealed they were going to be taken over by Lloyds. More specifically, he was accused of being a pawn in some insider trading scam, with a mole feeding him information that would affect the markets. It was an accusation that George Osbourne ratified and then Peston, with typical aplomb, deflected with the Deripaska-Rothschild-Osbourne yacht scoop, while the FT defended Pesto to the hilt.

Still, the criticisms haven’t gone away. “Newspapers have the same sort of obligation as they do during a war”, said Simon Jenkins on the media’s role in the crisis, i.e. shut up and not “scare” people. Jenkins of course chose instead, on the day of the worst stock market fall in years, to romp up Cader Idris and uncork his babbling, Biblical prose. How responsible of him!

So Peston faced the committee yesterday, and he rebuffed the criticisms in a hyper-Pestonian manner. This was Pesto off the leash, allowed to roam free over vowels and clauses, a style described politely as “loquacious” by the Guardian and perhaps more accurately as having “sentences like giant sausages” by Quentin Letts in the Mail. “I know lots and lots and lots of people, including you, and, y’know, I talk to lots and lots and lots of people”, was his version of refusing to outline his sources. Slick.

The main thing is that Northern Rock was screwed even if Peston did create a run on it, something that the other journos at the hearing all concurred with. Jenkins’s wider notion of not reporting financial stories to maintain market stability is flawed too, as transparency moves to the front of the agenda. Jenkins, for his part, kept pretty quiet at the meetings, only piping up to tell the assembled committee kettles that they were black: ”By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch. What have you been doing all the time?” Well, at least they haven’t been telling people to “invest in sanity” and buy “shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love”. If only we’d just given Fred The Shred a nice big hug, then none of this horridness would have happened!

Peston, meanwhile, nailed the whole conundrum when he says that impact upon share price is “peripheral” to the provision of information to the masses. That’s what journalism is – can you remember that far back, Jenkins?