Nicky Morgan has gone all in over explosive RBS report. Publication may now be inevitable

There may yet be blood on the floor over a potentially explosive report into the treatment of small business customers that fell into the hands of Royal Bank of Scotland's controversial Global Restructuring Group (GRG).

The latest move in the high stakes poker game being played between the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Treasury Select Committee, over publication has seen the latter going all in.

Chair Nicky Morgan says the committee will hire an independent legal advisor to review the ‘detailed summary’ of the skilled persons review into the business that the FCA has offered to publish. If they’re not satisfied that it represents a fair reflection of the report, she will go over the watchdog's head and invoke Parliamentary privilege to get it into the public domain.

The watchdog has already said it will appoint its own independent QC to mark its homework.

The problem has been created by the fact that such ‘skilled person’s’ reviews of businesses tend to contain a great deal of highly sensitive information. They are usually commissioned as part of the FCA’s investigatory processes and pass off without anyone outside of the regulator and the institution concerned knowing they were produced, unless and until their findings lead to disciplinary action.

RBS, however, is a high profile, publicly supported institution. Its past conduct of small business lending (which was not actually a regulated activity), and the treatment of clients who got into distress, has created a high profile public scandal. So this is anything but a usual situation.

Complicating matters still further is the fact that the BBC has already got its hands on the full, unexpurgated document. That led to the broadcaster publishing its own summary, through a news report that said the GRG report had found that “inappropriate action” - such as dubious fees being charged or interest charges being raised - was experienced by 92 per cent of the firms seen by GRG. In only 10 per cent of cases did clients, who it was in theory supposed to nurse back to health, find their way back into the bank’s mainstream.

With a vocal core of very angry people who had dealings with it, many of whom lost their businesses and livelihoods, agitating for full publication, and unlikely to be satisfied with anything less than that, the situation resembles a powder keg.

Ms Morgan’s move has added still more explosive material to it.

I’d imagine the FCA will do its damnedest to produce a fair and accurate summary, not least because it will get flayed if it does not.

But even if what emerges satisfies two QCs, Ms Morgan, and the BBC (because you can bet that it will also compare the two) it is unlikely to satisfy the critics of the bank or of the regulator.

With the report already in the hands of a major media outlet, and an unknown number of others, Ms Morgan, who has used the issue to step out from under the long shadow cast by her predecessor Andrew Tyrie, might very well feel that having climbed halfway up the hill, she might just as well go all the way up to the top.

She wouldn’t appear to have much to lose by so doing, and she could end up being cast as the hero of mistreated small businesses. How could any Conservative resist that?