“I have sinned," the Rev Paul Flowers, the disgraced former chairman of Co-op Bank, bravely confessed this week in an interview with Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman. He then went on to dismiss sin as an “old-fashioned term” that he would rarely use. Yet one rather more modern excuse which the Methodist minister was prepared to avail himself of was that none of what happened at the bank was really his fault, because he had been positively vetted for the job by the Financial Services Authority. By implication, therefore, the blame lay with the FSA for approving him in the first place.