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On Radio Scotland's 'Newsweek Scotland' programme, I was asked to reflect on recent banking events, having attended the three meetings at which shareholders agreed to the government's bailout.

It's been suggested I put my script on this blog. How could I refuse? It went something like this:

Stevenson, McKillop, Blank. Not household names, though perhaps they should be.

A politician who landed in doo-doo as deep as these guys did has to answer for it down the barrel of a TV camera.

But the chairmen of the three banks - together requiring a bailout from the government of 拢37bn (let's say that again, lest we get too used to it ... thirty-seven billion pounds) have been oddly reluctant to step forward and explain themselves, what went wrong and why the public have to clear up after them.

But for Sir Victor Blank, Sir Tom McKillop and Lord Dennis Stevenson there's been a more private reckoning.

If you head a public company, the people who can call you to account are your shareholders. And this is when the crusty chairman earns his crust.

So that's why, in recent weeks and without being allowed to record it, I have sat through the toe-curling embarrassment as one noble lord and two grand knights of the corporate realm have faced up to ... the little people, the lesser mortals.

In each case, they arrived at the meeting with enough votes in their back pockets from their institutional investors to guarantee 90 plus per cent of the votes.

But in each case, they had to take their punishment for as long as small-scale shareholders wished to keep asking questions.

The bosses could only hope other shareholders got bored, hungry or, in the case of Lloyds TSB, for the Glasgow conference centre chill to remove all feeling from their toes.

Given the scale of the calamity that's befallen the Royal Bank of Scotland, Halifax Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB, it's surely not asking much for these chairmen to face two or three hours of mainly harmless humiliation.

But this wasn't any interrogation. The few hundred people who make it their business to, well, to take care of business are overwhelmingly retired and male ... blazers and bristling indignation.

Questions come from curmudgeons, bores, some probe at the minutiae of company law and accounting standards. One complained about the parking charges.

Most, however, are the backbone of middle class Britain - people who saved and invested in blue chip banks, little thinking them a serious risk.

There are former bank staff, all book-keeping caution and respectability, unable to comprehend how centuries of tradition fell into the hands of people - one notoriously arrogant in shredding his headcount, another recruited from, whisper it, a supermarket - who didn't seem to understand what they were doing, trading, risking, or the exposure of millions of these seemingly little people and their little nesteggs.

Here was a reminder that banks are not just about fat cats. They're not separate from the real economy.

They ARE the real economy, their failings impacting on the lives of real workers, investors and savers.

The telling difference between the meetings was in the power of an apology.

At Lloyds TSB, the patrician Sir Victor Blank, was least willing to concede mistakes, and he paid for it with the most hostile reception.

Why, they asked, is this sound, safe bank in need of a bailout and taking on the HBOS mortgage book, much of that suffering from financial subsidence?

Mixing empathy with condescension, Lord Stevenson was neither happy nor proud to face HBOS's owners, he said.

As a shareholder, he understood, shared their anxieties, there were regrets and, yes, he used the 'sorry' word.

But he antagonised them too, by making out the fault was with a financial tsunami and a recessionary gale - as if the banks were merely the victims of this double whammy act of God.

The Royal Bank's chairman took the link to divinity one step further. Instead of summoning shareholders to the grandiose Gogarburn headquarters, Sir Tom McKillop convened proceedings in the General Assembly hall of the Church of Scotland.

Unlike exhibition centre warehouses and hangars, its solid beams are heavy with the nation's history. And the air was heavy with the nation's judgement.

This felt like a religious rite of contrition or repentance. Sir Tom, a research chemist turned would-be corporate alchemist, appeared genuinely shocked and humbled by his fiduciary failings.

One shareholder even got his departing chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin - the chief villain of this audacious reverse bank heist - to use the 's' word too.

It was accepted at face value.

In America, financial collapse is a bonanza for litigation lawyers.

But so far in Britain, we seem to make do with a tiny handful of resignations and some grovelling apologies. That, and billions of our pounds at risk.