LIKE everyone reading this, I woke up on Monday to find that I owned a bank.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced at the start of this week that crisis-hit Northern Rock is being taken into “temporary public ownership”.

But there’s no need to use three words when one will do, so let’s just call it nationalisation.

And I don’t buy the temporary bit either – to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there’s nothing so permanent as that which a Government minister insists is temporary.

We, the taxpayers, now own a high street bank which has nearly a million account holders, 800,000 mortgages and 6,000 staff.

This extraordinary development raises many questions.

First of all, what does the Government want from Northern Rock during this “temporary” period under its control?

Will it aggressively chase new customers to make the bank more attractive to potential buyers when the housing market picks up in a few years?

Other banks, without the considerable weight of millions of taxpayers backing them up, may well be upset if this happens.

So will the newly-nationalised Northern Rock do the opposite, and sit on its hands while its remaining account holders head for the lifeboats? The other banks may be happy with this, but this begs the question, who is going to want to buy a bank without customers?

And what about those 800,000 mortgage holders? Should they expect that a bank owned by the Government will go easy on them – especially in the run-up to an election?

And what also of the 6000 people who work for the Rock, for whom I would guess the last six months have not been a lot of fun?

Will they get the kind of job security that other public sector workers enjoy? Or are their numbers to be “rationalised” to cut costs?

The whole thing is a mind-boggling mess for the Government.

And while the Conservatives demand the resignation of Alistair Darling and declare him a “dead man walking”, I don’t believe much of this is actually the Chancellor’s fault.

It seems to me that Northern Rock’s problems were mostly self-made, caused by too much borrowing on the money markets which – as advertisers remind us – can go down as well as up.

I don’t believe that Mr Darling – or indeed his predecessor at the Treasury, Gordon Brown – can be held directly responsible for the reckless investments of a private bank.

But the Government is certainly to blame for what happened after the bank got into such serious trouble back in September.

After the Bank of England gave the Rock emergency funding, account holders were told repeatedly by Government ministers that their money was safe.

But the bank’s customers voted with their feet queuing – in an orderly British way of course – to withdraw their money from Northern Rock branches across the country.

All those reassuring words from ministers made no difference, the lines just kept growing. In the first day of the crisis the bank’s share price fell by a third.

With the Rock looking like it might go under, the Government stepped in with the most expensive sticking plaster in history, promising to guarantee all deposits.

Only then did the run on the bank stop.

But why did it come to this? Why did those worried customers ignore Government advice that there was no need to close their accounts and wander down the high street with their life savings in their hands?

Well for me, the most revealing quote of this whole sorry episode came in the first few days, after the queues had formed but before the Government stepped in to guarantee all deposits.

A TV journalist interviewed some of the people waiting in line outside a branch to withdraw their money.

Why, he asked one man, was he standing in a queue all day waiting to take out his cash, when the Government had promised him that his money was safe?

Well, the customer replied, it was the same Government which had assured him a few years earlier that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In that man’s mind, the word of cabinet ministers – which had proved so unreliable in the past – meant nothing to him now.

In this sense, it is fair to lay the blame for the Northern Rock crisis at the door of the Government.

Having been proved so embarrassingly wrong about Iraq, the Labour government has little credibility left to fall back on in an emergency.

“Stay calm, everything’s fine” ministers protest, and the people assume that it’s time to head for the lifeboats.

This is just one of the many unintended consequences of Tony Blair’s disastrous decision to support an insanely stupid war in the Middle East.

A war which will be five years old next month by the way, with no end in sight.

Will the “temporary pubic ownership” of Northern Rock last as long?

I have no idea.

Perhaps the Government can tell me.

Fitting tribute to Father Ted

SOME of us at Examiner HQ like to pass the time by trading lines from long-gone sitcoms.

One of the most popular choices is Father Ted.

A few lines from My Lovely Horse and the working day seems so much better.

I loved the cult Irish comedy when it was on back in the 1990s.

What wasn’t to love – Father Jack’s single-minded devotion to alcohol, Mrs Doyle’s equally firm dedication to tea, Father Dougal, permanently and wonderfully baffled about everything – especially religion.

And Ted himself, a tragic figure, always hoping to get off Craggy Island and back to somewhere bigger where – in his own mind at least – a man of his talents belonged.

If only he hadn’t left other people’s money “resting” in his account.

Years after the programme has finished – and long after the death of the show’s star Dermot Morgan – it remains extremely popular.

Next weekend sees the annual TedFest with Inis Mor off the coast of Galway playing the part of the fictional Craggy Island.

Hundreds of fans, many of them dressed as priests, will flock to the island to celebrate the sitcom.

And looking at the schedule, I’m sure it’ll be great craic.

There will be a priests and nuns five-a-side, a lovely girls competition and the Song for Europe.

And best of all, the Old Grey Whistle Hunt on the Sunday morning.

Indeed the festival is now so popular that little Inis Mor can no longer cope with all the participants so some of this year’s events will take place on the mainland.

Given how much Ted wanted to escape Craggy Island, I think it’s what he would have wanted.