A peculiar crisis has overtaken the Co-operative movement. This group of businesses based on co-operative principles – which means they are owned by their customers – lost its way when it bought the troubled Britannia Building Society, apparently following mainstream corporate orthodoxy that bigger is always better. It tried to expand again by taking over a large slice of Lloyds Bank, only to discover that the Co-op Bank’s own financial foundations needed emergency shoring up. Then its chairman, a Methodist minister, resigned over a personal scandal involving drugs, and it emerged that his main ­qualification for the job was his ignorance of banking. Going to the opposite extreme, perhaps, the board then appointed as chief executive a hard-nosed businessman, Euan Sut