A pacy account of the storm before the bailout Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy By Iain Martin Simon and Schuster, £20 Towards the end of Iain Martin's enlightening new book about the 2008 collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, he mentions the regulator's own report into the disaster, published with some reluctance two years ago. "It is not a full account of the rise and fall of RBS," Martin writes. In a very British way, there [was] no proper wide-ranging committee of inquiry into the UK's biggest ever banking disaster. The report, ex­tracted from the Financial Services Authority after it claimed there was no need to publish, did to an extent sate the popular bloodlust for apportioning blame. But in terms of exp­lain­ing what went wrong, it fell sad­ly short. Making it Happen fills the gap pretty well. It strikes a well-researched balance bet­ween nitty-gritty technicalities and readability. There is a pacy start to the book that immediately immerses the reader in the drama of October 7 2008 - a day that saw Fred Goodwin start the morning with an up­beat investor presentation and end the afternoon with a share price down 40 per cent. Martin's hour-by-hour ac­count from the perspective of bankers, regulators and politicians ends in the overnight thrashing out of the government's £50bn bailout package for the banking sector. A fast rewind to RBS's 17th-century roots is a little abrupt and at times unfathomable. But it does help to contextualise the later det­ails of RBS's global expansion as a symbol of Scottish chutzpah. Thereafter, the book is largely a chronology of Goodwin's career. There is nice detail about his initial ordinariness (he started out as an accountant), life-long competitiveness (evident on the university pin­ball machines as well as at RBS) and his showy side (as a student he ferried friends in a gold Rover 2000) - all attributes reflected later in his personal insistence that the bank's fleet of limousines should be bespoke-painted Pantone 281, the RBS blue. Journalist Martin re­minds us that before bec­om­ing CEO of RBS Goodwin had spent only three years in banking - a prime explanation for Goodwin's shortcomings. As a manager of a business, he was impressive - demanding and of­ten bullying, he also ach­ieved notable res­ults. But as a manager of a bank, he was a disaster - little interested in credit control, let alone the complex investment banking products that helped to trigger RBS's blow-up. His focus on hitting targets ignored a changing world that often made the targets unwisely aggressive. There are great anecdotes about Goodwin's outlawing of Sellotape to display notices in bran­ches, and his obsession with branch cleanliness - aided and abetted by his mother. After spying a cigarette butt outside a branch, Goodwin's mother phoned him: "Goodwin thanked his moth­er and immediately phoned another senior ex­ec­utive, ordering him to have the offending piece of litter removed immediately." More fundamentally, Martin is good on the fateful build-up of RBS's US business, particularly its collateralised debt obligations - the ultimate trigger for investors" loss of faith and the bank's demise. There is, however, next to nothing on the ill-judged expansion of property loans in Europe, which is a shame. This is not entirely a book about Goodwin's failings. Board members, executives, regulators all look culpable. The FSA is characterised as absurd­ly "relaxed" in 2007, as RBS's toxic loans accumulate and it presses ahead regardless with the capital-destructive acquisition of Dutch rival ABN Amro. New light is shone on Goodwin's notorious £16.9m pension pot, too - accumulated swiftly only because he had been hired with a bizarre promise that for retirement purposes he would be treated as a life-long employee. RBS today is in finer fettle than it was five years ago but it is still largely government-owned. Anyone with an interest in what exactly happened back then and why will enjoy this book. It is a better account than others published so far - and it certainly beats the regulator's official version. The writer is the FT's banking editor