He's going to get together with some cronies from the old days and sort the bank out. The government's offering lots of cash to keep it going and he'll tap into that, stop all the dodgy lending and it should be right as rain within a year or two.

Oh and there's every chance a foreign bank will lend a few billion. Blackfriar reckons he'll have a deal sewn up by the end of next week.

Anyway there's no need for HBOS to continue with its forced marriage with Lloyds TSB, which is paying peanuts for a great British institution. Deal?

No, of course not. But is Blackfriar's offer so different from the ones being proposed by the Scottish banking grandees?

The two former bank chiefs Sir Peter Burt and Sir George Mathewson want to boot out HBOS's chairman and chief executive and keep HBOS as a stand-alone bank.

At the same time Jim Spowart, former chief executive of Intelligent Finance, is rumoured to be talking to Bank of China about a rival offer.

So what are Sir George and Sir Peter proposing? That they take over at the top of HBOS and re-evaluate the situation.

Right. Any new finance to back their plans? Er, no, but these two seem to think they can wave a magic wand and sort out the problems.

Gordon Brown said yesterday that Lloyds was the only "serious" bidder and shareholders had only one "realistic" option on the table.

It isn't rocket science to see that having viewed the HBOS books, Lloyds and the Government swiftly worked out that no-one in their right minds would want to take it on. And the last thing they want to do is open up the books to bidders who have no financial resources behind them.

HBOS is massively reliant on the wholesale market, where it gets 44 per cent of its funding. It is also Britain's biggest mortgage lender with a whopping 20 per cent of the market giving it huge exposure to the housing downturn.

Sir Peter and Sir George insist that a "properly recapitalised, properly run and independent HBOS" would be in the interests of shareholders and employees.

Yes that would be a lovely scenario, but how do you recapitalise it with no money behind you?

As far as shareholders are concerned most of them want the deal to go through. Some 50 per cent of shareholders own shares in both banks so what they lose on HBOS they gain on Lloyds.

Scotland's most influential fund manager Standard Life certainly isn't buying into the tartan tirade. It said earlier this week the Lloyds bid is the only credible offer on the table.

Shareholders also know that a cut price Lloyds takeover is better than seeing HBOS nationalised which would leave investors with nothing.

So, where does it leave employees, the other big stakeholders in this battle?

It leaves them in a fairly bleak position and it's likely that 15,000 to 20,000 jobs will be lost as the whole point of the Lloyds takeover is massive cost cuts.

With 135,000 employees between them the combined bank could lose around 15 per cent of the workforce. It's not good news, but better than the third that lost their jobs when Northern Rock was nationalised.

It's easy to laugh at the Scottish grandees – the pair have launched independenthbos.com, a website to win over HBOS's two million small shareholders, which runs the terse statement: "Site Under Construction" – but these are people's jobs and livelihoods at stake.

Maybe the Scottish knights should return to semi-retirement unless they have concrete plans to offer.