After the 2008 crash, RBS faced years of restructuring, job cuts, and ultimately a change in direction. It has since focused on its core markets in the UK and Ireland and cut back on risky investment banking operations.

Baroness Vadera told the BBC that the bailout allowed the UK economy to stabilise in a way that other countries didn’t achieve.

“The cost of that has been much lower economic growth on average for the next decade than we would have otherwise had,” she says.

Eight years later, the government announced it was embarking on the long road to selling down its stake. An initial plan to privatise NatWest at a hefty loss was abandoned by then Chancellor George Osborne, partly due to pressure from the opposition Labour Party. Instead, the government decided to sell the shares gradually.

The last to sell was UK Government Investments, the Treasury’s investment arm. Sir Tom Scholar, its Chief Executive, has in a statement thanked NatWest staff and stated the sale was an “important step in the plan to return the bank to private ownership.”

Mr Haythornthwaite has said that NatWest, having provided critical banking services during the Covid pandemic, is now focused on the bank’s future, including large-scale investments in technology and climate change initiatives, as part of its shift to a greener economy.

Looking ahead, has the UK banking sector learned the lessons of 2008?

The Treasury says that a decade of reform has made banks more resilient to economic shocks, including the threat of a cyber attack from a hostile state.

“The UK government has invested more than £2 billion in cyber security over five years, introduced new regulatory requirements and the Bank of England established a new spy agency to protect the banking sector from potential cyber threats,” it reports.

They add that the Bank of England’s work on resolution and recovery means that bank balance sheets are now crenellated to absorb losses, so that taxpayers do not need to step in to protect depositors and the wider economy.

Andrew Bailey has said that nobody wants to have to nationalise a bank again, but he cautions not to be complacent. RBS now trades as part of the NatWest Group, emerging into an uncertain future by re-emerging into private hands.

That night in October 2008 seems a world away, but the consequences of letting the banking system collapse would have been unimaginable.