Mr. William Beausang:

Just while I'm waiting for it to come up, I certainly had no sense of a predetermined outcome on 26 September. I think what the Secretary General was asking me to do was make sure that we had more information on an option that was increasingly emerging as one of the options that would be put on the table whenever this thing came to a head. I mean, I was reviewing, obviously, the paper trail myself, and what I established was that the power to actually provide a blanket guarantee in the contingency legislation only went in around then, around 25 or 26 September. Up to then, there was a power to provide financial support to a distressed institution, but just a single institution, there wasn't a sense of that we were providing a power that could provide a broad blanket guarantee across the whole of the financial system. So that gives some indication, I suppose, as to the point that the guarantee came very clearly, you know, was very formally on our radar or in our planning in terms of it being in the contingency legislation that was being developed at that time. Up to then, it wasn't in the Bill.