The National Audit Office website has a handy answer to the question of whether we will get our money back. "It is likely that a substantial proportion of these schemes and investments will be with us for some time and the eventual profit or loss to the taxpayer will not be known until all the support is removed, the loans repaid and the shares sold."

The NAO itself clearly is tasked with looking at this from only one angle (as a balance sheet/profit & loss auditor). Even the NAO admits it is a big ask to get out of this any time soon.

The NAO also acknowledges what is frequently missed: the share purchases in RBS/NatWest were only a small part of the entire amount put at risk by the UK taxpayer. The Asset Protection Scheme and contingent liabilities involved the UK taxpayer putting up £210 billion just to keep the bank trading.

If the banking crisis in Europe continues to get worse and RBS/NatWest gets sucked in, then that money is at risk. So £255 billion is the real RBS/NatWest bill.

Those who simply cannot remove the private sector spectacles and state that the recovery of the share price is what must drive our concerns, because this will enable a sale, are citizens of Lah Lah land.

This is what leads to support for bonuses in the public sector banks, because such things make it look like, feel like, good old proper RBS/NatWest - a real private sector bank again. They desperately want to believe again.

The completely discredited business concept of shareholder value - that the best way to run a business is to drive the entire business based on outputs to the shareholder - is one of the things that got us all into the mess we are in.

And I get a hint of this in current defenders of the RBS/NatWest shareholder-return model. UKFI (the taxpayers' representative in RBS/West) also seems to believe this model, too.

I would suggest that the taxpayer is not interested in the share price of the bank at all. The taxpayer wants the investment in the bank returned in a real way.

They would like the bank they own to behave like a bank the taxpayer owns. Not like a bog standard bank a few hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds own.

In other words, the taxpayer wants the wider health of the economy and businesses and people to be what drives the bank's operations: not its share price.

I repeat - let's get real: the bank must be taken off a private sector footing now, and be run as a nationalised public sector bank which is tasked with getting lending out into businesses, particularly small businesses, and based in the regions. Any other approach is simply putting the real investment of the taxpayer at even greater risk.

I was particularly struck by the amount of times RBS/NatWest was referred to this week as "semi-privatised". At about 83 per cent of the shareholding by the taxpayer, the private sector involvement is less a "semi" and more a shed in the back garden.

The only reason to pay a single bonus to a single employee in RBS/NatWest is because we want to continue to pretend.

The wider issues are far more worrying, however. The only reason banks of all hues, private and public, in the UK want to get past the bonus season is because they know that it nearly never happened.

There was (and continues to be) a massive European banking crisis and it almost all went belly up again over the Christmas period.

If state central bank interventions across Europe had not taken place to artificially pump up the asset bases of structurally significant banks in every country in Europe, then the New Year would have seen a continent-wide domino collapse of banks which would have without doubt crashed into all of the UK banks.

The private sector and the markets, if left to themselves would have found us all back where we were in 2008. This story is still playing itself out today.

On one day over Christmas the European central bank effectively pumped €489 billion into European banks. Did it get into European and UK businesses?

Un petit peu? Ein bisschen? Un poco? Nichts, nada, rien!

So what was it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Indeed, at one point in January €464 billion was put straight back on deposit to the same central bank that lent the money.

It simply lies in bank vaults across Europe making bankers feel better and enabling them to pretend that they are part of a private sector which no-one else recognises. And zombie banks pay bonuses.

Santander, by some estimates the biggest bank in Europe (and buyer of our failed Bradford & Bingley, and Alliance & Leicester and Abbey National), received a big chunk of the Euro money. They won't say how much, but Spanish banks had at least €21 billion - so you can bet it was a massive portion of that. They admitted simply sitting on this as a "buffer".

Private debt in banks, not sovereign debt, was and is the problem and could yet hit us in the solar plexus again some time soon if there is a disorderly Greek default which affects banks big time.

As sailors will tell you, look for the following sea - Portuguese two-year debt was this week at 21 per cent. The markets see the waves will crash there first.

Had the market been left to itself last month then I can assure you that not a penny piece in bonuses would have been paid out in this round to anyone in any of the UK banks (especially Barclays, HSBC and Santander) because there wouldn't have been any money to distribute.