Andrea Leadsom misses the cut for the banking inquiry

By Peter Hoskin
^{Follow Peter on Twitter}

As revealed by ITV's Lucy Manning, the quietly assertive chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, will lead Parliament's inquiry into the banks. Joining him will be his select committee colleagues Mark Garnier, Pat McFadden, Andy Love and John Thurso. Four men to take on who-knows-how-many rate fixers.

However, as with David Beckham's exclusion from the Olympics football squad, it's the omissions that are more eyecatching. Among them is Andrea Leadsom, another Treasury Select Committee member and former Barclays employee, who was ferociously brilliant in her questioning of Bob Diamond, the other week — and matched it in her observations afterwards. She also, you'll remember, recently suggested that George Osborne apologise for trying to tie Labour (specifically, Ed Balls) to the Libor scandal.

And there's also Labour's John Mann, another select committee member who tried to cut Diamond, so to speak. He's currently raging against his exclusion on Twitter, even saying that "I'm going to run my own inquiry into the banking scandal".

Of course, not all shall sit on parliamentary inquiries — but leaving out Leadsom and Mann does seem to undermine this one from the off. There was already enough froth and divide about whether the inquiry should be conducted by MPs or by a judge. Now that the MPs have finally been chosen, that divide looks likely to remain.