GEORGE Osborne has said he regrets not radically restructuring Royal Bank of Scotland five years ago as he vowed to "get rid of it" as soon as possible after the election if the Conservatives win.
Some £45 billion of money was pumped into RBS during the financial crisis 2008 and the bank remains 80 per cent owned by the taxpayer.
The bank has since seen the chief executive leave, replaced by Ross McEwan, and in 2013 it set about revamping its retail banking arm.
However, in an interview for the FT Weekend Magazine, Mr Osborne said that for several years before that he had gone along with the bank's insistence that the investment bank was going to be a viable business.
He said: "I certainly regret that. I did what I could to correct it."
A report out earlier this week claimed as many as 14,000 of the 18,000 jobs in RBS corporate and institutional banking could disappear in the bank's latest slimdown.
Mr Osborne has previously signalled that the bank would be ready to be privatised this year and he has reiterated that ambition, setting out his goal to begin the process in the summer - if the Tories are voted back into power.
"When I say 'get rid of it', I mean put it into the good hands of the private sector," he said.
"First, it's not an exact science, but on some measures it's bigger than all the privatisations of the 1980s put together. Second, I think people want to see they get their money back. The British taxpayer wants to feel they haven't suffered some enormous loss.
"So there are constraints around it, but it's certainly something I would want to get moving on in the summer after the election. I would want to see a review on a plan for disposal."
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