The joke might be wearing thin, but the principle behind it might not be such a bad idea. Providing some clarity of purpose to an industry that has forgotten how to market itself would be good news for customers and taxpayers.
With a few exceptions (Abbey and HSBC being the most notable), the country's retail banks are in a state of almost total chaos. Bankers are now right up there with journalists and traffic wardens in the ranks of the publicly loathed professions.
John McFall, chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, illustrated the point more effectively than he realised earlier this month, when he asked the former bosses of RBS and HBOS to provide the Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'bank' (which is centred, not unnaturally, on the premise of an organisation that safely keeps its customers' money). Neither of them could do so.
In that moment, Andy Hornby, who ran HBOS, and Sir Fred Goodwin, lately of RBS, revealed just how far banks have lurched from their traditional roles as boring utilities, the primary function of which was lending unremarkable sums of money to retail and small-business customers.
Later this week, RBS will almost certainly announce the biggest loss in British corporate history - about £8bn, give or take a few hundred million. Its new chief executive, Stephen Hester, will also unveil the results of a strategic review involving selling off lots of the more exotic parts of the group, which are incompatible with public ownership. He will say that the core business of lending in the UK - along with a continued, but diminished, presence overseas - will once again be RBS' raison d'etre.
But what has NatWest been doing to inform its customers that their money is safe? (The Chancellor has effectively guaranteed all bank deposits, so saying so would hardly have been misleading.) Where has the apology been for the anxiety it has caused those uncertain whether their savings are secure?
Until last autumn, the main premise of NatWest's brand advertising was the fact that its branches were more likely to be open on Saturdays than those of its rivals - it would be interesting to know how effective that was in securing customers or preventing defections.
That campaign was symptomatic of a bank bored with being boring. And since the government acquired its stake in RBS, the more logical 'Helpful banking' strapline employed by NatWest has been let down by the daily experience of many of its customers (witness the complaints received from those small-business owners whose overdrafts are being renegotiated).
It is not only RBS that has been guilty in this respect. But the fact that nearly 70% of it is now in public ownership means it has a different role to play and one that its marketing department has an obligation to reflect.
The sooner the high-street banks return to their 'boring utility' status, focused on delivering high-quality basic banking and avoiding the riskiest elements of what McFall called 'casino banking' - the taxpayer is already sitting on a paper loss of many billions of pounds - the sooner we might get our money back. And that would be something worth advertising.
Mark Kleinman is City editor of The Sunday Telegraph
30 seconds on... John McFall
- John McFall is the Labour and Co-operative Party MP for West Dunbartonshire in Scotland.
- According to The Times business editor David Wighton, McFall 'landed more blows on Gordon Brown, during his time as Chancellor, than several of the PM's former Conservative shadows'.
- McFall is chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, a post to which he was first elected in 2001.
- The body won the award for Select Committee of the Year 2008 in recognition of its work on the banking crisis and the 10p tax affair. On the latter, it helped persuade the Treasury to put in place measures to compensate those affected by the abolition of the tax rate.
- McFall, a former school teacher, has the distinction of being the third-fastest MP to have run the London Marathon, in three hours and three minutes (the quickest is newspaper columnist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris).