It will take more than ‘telling Sid’ to rid the state of its stake in NatWest | Business

Selling unloved nationalised businesses back to the private sector is anything but easy. Margaret Thatcher had to hold her nose for years as she injected public money into state-owned British Leyland, a byword for unreliable cars and rancorous industrial relations, before finally offloading it to British Aerospace.

It took 13 years under public ownership before the country’s then biggest carmaker — famous for shonky Austin Allegros and Morris Marinas — was renamed Rover Group and handed to the defence group in 1988. Even then, Thatcher, to her fury, had to pay BAe a sweetener to get shot of it.

A generation later and it is exactly 13 years too since Royal Bank of Scotland, now renamed NatWest, underwent its own nationalisation, rescued with £45.5 billion