This morning in Canary Wharf, Bob Diamond, the president of Barclays, will address investors and analysts on his plans for the bank's investment banking operations. It was a presentation arranged weeks ago, long before he went into talks to rescue Lehman Brothers. Whether he is there in person or by video-link from New York, Mr Diamond will be under intense pressure to explain his role in the extraordinary events of the past three days. Barclays has pulled out of Lehman negotiations, but it went a long way towards a deal.

In the end, the refusal of the US Treasury to offer to shoulder at least some of the risk seems to have blunted Mr Diamond's interest. “Somebody needed to blink and nobody blinked,” one source familiar with the negotiations said last night.

It is less than two months ago that Barclays came as supplicant to its shareholders in search of £4.5 billion to beef up its threadbare balance sheet. It is only a month since it all but forswore significant acquisitions and hailed the merits of quiet organic growth.

Yet Mr Diamond, backed by the rest of the Barclays board, was seriously pursuing a big acquisition at the eye of a financial markets storm. Even if it had been structured to leave the toxic assets behind, it was never going to be without risk.

Shareholders are not so daft as to regard every strategic utterance as set in stone. Managements have to be free to change their minds when circumstances change. They must be allowed to pursue opportunistic deals.

Barclays deserves the benefit of the doubt. It showed restraint last year when it refused to overpay for ABN Amro, allowing the Royal Bank of Scotland consortium to win that battle. It said that it would not press the button on any acquisition before ensuring it met several tests. Barclays is proud of its self-discipline.

It has now shown restraint a second time. A third “near miss”, however, and the bank's claims that it infinitely prefers organic growth will start to sound a bit hollow.

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