The problem for them is not just the immediate unlawful breach, but the fact that the main point of doing all of this in the opening of the crisis in 2007/8 was to prevent itself actually becoming an immediate casualty.

It has been my judgement all along that Barclays was in danger of going belly up along with RBS/NatWest and HBOS. Their lying (again, they have coughed to this) to the markets and everyone else seems to have been a necessity.

Readers of my Birmingham Post blogs will be aware that I have not held back in the past in my criticism of Barclays in its pretence that it was an unbailed-out, strong bank in contrast to the other UK bank basket cases.

My argument was that it was just lucky, and it and HSBC were the last banks standing in a collapse.

Just as in the States in the auto industry it was the later Obama-bailed-out General Motors that went bust rather than Ford (who had entirely fortuitously and without any foreknowledge or prescience) sorted things out with its banks, perilously close to the later collapse.

So with Barclays.

There was nothing fundamentally different in their banking business models and practices to those of all of the others, most of which went bust. Barclays only really survived because the others went bust first. Someone had to survive, because governments decided they had to step in to salvage something.

Desperately, Barclays then turned to Middle East Sovereign wealth funds for a bailout to avoid asking the UK government for one. It effectively got a government bailout - just from the Middle East instead.

They still participated in the various taxpayer-funded and -backed liquidity schemes: from taxpayers without love.

Without bailout by the UK taxpayer of the entire UK bank system, Barclays would have gone belly up along with HSBC.

So it is no surprise to me that they panicked and pulled off this con trick.

Bearing in mind that, without doubt, the most important asset in banking is, indeed, confidence, then a bank playing a confidence trick is extremely serious.

That they were left standing allowed them to spend 2 to 3 years hoovering up all the free money at cheap rates pumped out by central banks the world over. They actually took their cuts in all of the deals to move this money around the world economy. Without real competition they could charge what they like and they did. They even hoovered up Lehman brothers and mopped up Stateside.

They could only do so and go from strength to strength because they were there. They survived - just. It could have been a different story.

And would it have been a different story if Barclays had told the truth, had been honest to the market, and as importantly to you and me as taxpayers? I believe that it would have been a different sorrier tale; and Barclays would have ended up in the bailout queue with all the rest.

When first we practise to deceive, the tangled web we weave can sometimes work out very nicely indeed in the end, actually.

It can also mean the difference between life and death, it seems, for this bank.