He testified to MPs before the meeting, providing them with a memo that outlines what he sees as the failings of HBOS to assess risk (FT Alphaville has the transcript here). As James Crosby, the man who did the sacking, wasn’t there, Stevenson and Hornby managed to deflect much of the questioning – Stevenson pointed to a nine-month FSA probe into the case falling in favour of HBOS, Hornby denied the charge of “threatening behaviour” made towards Moore’s team.

But now the Tories have spotted the political mileage in all this, don’t expect the issue to go away. They’re now calling for a probe into Crosby, to ascertain what happened and whether he’s fit to be deputy chairman of the FSA and Gordon Brown’s advisor on mortgage risk; George Osbourne has called the charges “exceptionally serious”.

And man, are they serious. Choice cuts from the memo include:

- “I told the Board they ought to slow down but was prevented from having this properly minuted by the CFO.”
-  Saying that the situation was like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”, and that no-one dared speak up about the flaws in HBOS’s overextended model.
- Crosby alone chose to fire him, and alone chose Dawson as his replacement, against the wishes of other Chairmen.
- A section of a report that criticised “over-eager” sales culture cut out of the final version given to execs, with Moore criticised when he attached it as an appendix to another paper.
- Charles Dunstone, a non-executive chairman responsible for risk control at Halifax, saying he was friendly and sociable with Andy Hornby, the very man he should have a professional distance from and willingness to challenge. Moore also says: “Dunstone himself admitted to me and my colleague one day words to the effect that he had no real idea how to be the Chairman of the Retail Risk Control Committee!”
- Added to this, he said on Newsnight last night that the FSA wanted “a quiet life” and ignored his whistle-blowing.

Moore says he was subject to a gagging order after he settled with HBOS over unfair dismissal, but says that now the matter is of such public interest he’s broken it – I wonder how much money was involved there, and whether HBOS would have a legal case against him? Well, it’s all out in the open now, and we can expect every little bit to be picked over.

The whistleblower silenced, the crooked CEO determined to build his company bigger and bigger – it’s clear that “HBOS: The Movie” would be awesome. The potential for “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” is massive. Maybe get William Fichtner to play Andy Hornby?

UPDATE, 11.59: The FT reports that Crosby has seen the fast-massing anger against him, fallen onto his sword and stepped down as FSA deputy chair. That was easy!

Proceedings began with an encouraging round of apologies, with the word “sorry” and everything, but the sincerity of these were swifly undone by the frustration and irritation shown by those concerned throughout, as well as by the willingness to pass the buck onto the FSA and the ratings agencies. And despite claims from one committee member that the press just thinks the purpose of the meeting was public humiliation, and that they really want to get to the reasons why the banks needed bailing out, the committee nonetheless allowed elements of generic banker-bashing to come in and reduce the debate to a circuitous mess.

First up was an attack on bonuses, which seems to be what everyone wants if not what the financial sector needs. Stevenson was ruffled, saying they moved into “a culture of long-term holdings” for bonuses; meanwhile Fred blamed the States for bringing over a culture of high remuneration, telling of the “angst” within the industry over the issue – it sounds horrid!

But then before going after McKillop and Hornby, the focus shifted, as it became often wont to do, to a different tack, forming a sloppily moderated debate that failed to follow anything to a sound conclusion. This allowed the contrite and flustered foursome to get back on track. Stevenson in particular became totally slick, refusing to be drawn on “emotive phrases” and even chuckling when “backed into a corner”.

Hornby started out badly, shifting in his seat like he’d soiled himself and his voice breaking and lisping, but a moronic line of questioning from John Mann allowed him to get some confidence back. Mann asked them whether there was anyone “more brilliant” that could have been on the board (almost certainly, but quantifiable how?), before moaning to Hornby that HBOS had messed up his change of address form. I suppose it’s better than waiting on hold in a call centre queue, but a select committee really isn’t the best place to air customer service gripes, John. It sounded like Hornby called his comments “facetious” – it got drowned out by other chatter, but if he did say it, then fair play.

Mann then tripped up Hornby by using the acronym “JSA” for Jobseekers Allowance, an attempt at showing how out of touch Hornby is with the common man when Hornby has to ask what it means, but who on earth uses “JSA” anyway? It was totally weak and an utter waste of time. Mann tried to be a crusader like Henry Waxman, but was just running up to Hornby and pulling his pants down – momentarily satisfying, but ultimately he ended up looking pointless and immature. Get that guy out of here!

Hornby, despite constantly using the “it was like that when I got here” excuse that John Thain of Citigroup recently used, went on to acquit himself well later when he cites what he did to increase liquidity and pull back leverage, and also admits more could have been done.

McKillop was a mixed bag, looking nicely tanned but bewildered and shaken at one point, having to be prodded by the moderator to answer a question. He also looked very shocked, understandably so, at one MP asking him if he’d taken any legal advice over criminal negligence; and when asked how much RBS overpaid for ABN-Amro, he fumbled and replied: ”Everything we paid, basically”, before saying the buyout was a “bad mistake”. But he did well later when explaining the shift from highly leveraged products towards focusing on generating capital back in late ‘07. 

As for Goodwin, it looks like the training from News Of The Screws man Phil Hall paid off – he seemed the most sorted of the lot, and was probably the least questioned of all. He didn’t back down from the questions over RBS’s international operations impacting upon the British taxpayer, and traded in generic apologies like ”You have to try and predict the future and you don’t always get it right”. Back to the Batcave he goes!

So while the men themselves held their own, it was often thanks to inane and useless points of debate that kept getting returned to, like the banking qualifications of the four men and their boards, as if someone was going to say “yes, we hired them all from the smoking area of the local Tesco, dropped the ball on that one”. It doesn’t matter what these guys did at uni, they’ve all had years at the helm of multinational banks! Move it on!

Finally John McFall finally realised it was the complexity of the international market that messed things up and began asking about that, not the fact that Fred did law and not business for his BA, but not until about three quarters of the way through. But before the end, some bozo starts asked them whether the screw-ups were because they all got enamoured with their own pedigree and reputations, which they’re never going to admit to even it were true! Gah!

There was a long rally where the FSA got batted back and forth – the foursome accused of incestuous and lacking risk management, with them defending their positions, and saying it was the fault of poorly assessed credit ratings and that the FSA had been in a “completely open society” with them, to use Stevenson’s words. At least this was getting towards the meat of the debate, though the issues were never locked down. Eventually they thrash things out to the point where Hornby sums up the situation by saying that it was no-one’s fault, just through being “property based on one side, [with a] reliance on wholesale funding on the other”. Which we already knew.

The moderator admits that the proceedings “haven’t assuaged the public’s anger”, but could this have been any other way? All we could have reasonably expected from this was some soundbites, rather than any genuinely constructive measures. It has bolstered the case against complex financial instruments, the need for less AAA ratings, and a more responsible attitude to liquidity and capital ratios. But we didn’t really need this debate for bankers to realise they need to be more transparent and prudent, and it didn’t make the rest of us feel better. There’s more action tomorrow, with the promise of more bonus bashing. It’ll just be for our own pleasure, rather than securing the future of the country, so can we get Paxo in to do it? It might actually feel a bit satisfying, rather than this feeling of wasted opportunity.

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?