Sir philip hampton began his career as an accountant "for reasons", he says, "that still elude me." He has since specialised in trying to drag big, venerable British companies out of the doldrums. Over the years he has been finance director of British Steel, British Gas, British Telecom and Lloyds TSB, and, since 2004, chairman of J. Sainsbury, a supermarket group. Yet even by those standards his latest post, as chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), is daunting, RBS is huge rather than just big: it was the world's largest bank by assets at the end of 2007. By corporate standards it is ancient rather than merely venerable, having been founded in 1727 and predating Robert Burns and even, some say, the kilt. And to say RBS is in the doldrums would be a gross understatement. It is on life support, 70% state-owned after receiving two bail-out packages in the past four months. On January 19th it signalled that it had made a loss of as much as ￡28 billion ($52 billion) in 2008, the biggest in British business history.
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