Sometime around spring next year, HM Treasury should finally sell its last share in NatWest, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, as it was. The process will only have taken 17 years. If that feels like an age, it is a shorter timespan than seemed likely only 12 months ago.
At the end of the last year, the government’s stake – 84.9% after the two-stage nationalisation by the last Labour administration in 2008-09 – was still 38%. Now it is down to 11.4% after the latest “directed buy-back”, in which the bank bought shares from the Treasury for cancellation – in this case £1bn-worth.
