SCORES of cheating bankers should have been jailed and former RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin banned from the boardroom in the wake of the financial crash, Gordon Brown says today.

The former Labour prime minister reveals in the latest excerpts from his memoirs he would have resigned if his October 2008 bank rescue strategy worth £500 billion had failed and the markets took fright.

Mr Brown warns that mistakes of the past have not been heeded and the prospect of rogue bankers gambling again with public money is “inevitable”.

He says: “If bankers who act fraudulently are not put in jail with their bonuses returned, assets confiscated and banned from future practice, we will only give a green light to similar risk-laden behaviour in new forms.”

He writes in his book – My Life, Our Times: “It cannot be right that Fred Goodwin walked away with all of his past bonuses untouched, a reported tax-free lump sum of £5 million, and even after he agreed to halve his pension, it still was said to amount to £300,000 a year.

“If bankers’ conduct was dishonest by the ordinary standards of what is reasonable and honest, should there not have been prosecutions in the UK as we have seen in Ireland, Iceland, Spain and Portugal?” Mr Brown said his risky his risky strategy to save the banks led him to warn his wife Sarah to be prepared "to pack our things for a sudden move out of Downing Street.”

Mr Brown adds in the book: “If what I was about to do failed, with markets collapsing further and confidence ebbing from Britain, I would have no choice but to resign. As I walked into the office, I didn’t know if I’d still be there at the end of the day.”

Mr Brown added that Northern Rock directors should have gone to prison for fraudulent claims about the state of their loan book.

The former chancellor also said Barclays, without the cash to do so, tried to buy RBS as well as Lehman Brothers, misled the UK authorities and, while taking public money from Qatar and UAE authorities, sought to claim they needed no state support; He said the HBOS disaster was compounded when dubious loss-making property purchases continued to be ramped up even as the financial crisis worsened; Mr Brown also said that had bosses restricted their dividends and paid themselves 10 per cent less, then the £50 billion public bail-out of HBOS and RBS would not have been necessary.

*the Conservatives were too soft on bankers after 2010 and that a Fraud Act is the way forward to secure prosecutions.

Noting how Britain’s banking culture has not changed, Mr Brown points out how the typical senior banker earns £1.3 million and that Britain has three-quarters – more than 4,000 – of Europe’s €1m bankers, a figure that has risen 50 per cent since the crisis.

He says even at RBS, with £58 billion of accumulated losses and a guarantee from the taxpayer, the number of bank employees earning more than €1million has barely changed.