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by Ray Fleming

U -turns seem to be the “in thing” in Britain at the moment but none has been executed more deftly than by Marcus Agius who resigned as chairman of Barclay's Bank on Monday but on Tuesday returned to his job on an interim basis. Actually I don't believe he ever left the building but just kept going round in a revolving door until he got dizzy and decided he needed to sit down at his old desk to recover. Clearly, he could teach Mr Cameron a thing or two about U-turns despite the prime minister's extensive experience of them over the past two years..

As I said in this space on Saturday the departure of the Barclays CEO Bob Diamond was inevitable whether he knew or didn't know what malfeasance had been afoot. It took him until yesterday to decide to go although he said he would keep his prearranged date with the Treasury Select Committee today. That should be very interesting indeed because now that Mr Diamond is a free agent he may want to be much more open about who else was involved in the Libor rigging than if he had remained in his job. Overall, it's a very bad business. The BBC's political editor Nick Robinson got it right when he said “Libor is to banking what the Millie Dowler case was to phone hacking.”