"If this was a panic, it was quintessentially British," says the Telegraph, which seems strangely heartened by the well-mannered queues of people outside Northern Rock branches waiting patiently to withdraw their money.
Like all of the papers, it prominently features pictures of queueing customers, but the Telegraph best describes the scenes. "Orderly queues, fold-up chairs, sensible shoes. The last days of the Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany it was not. Instead, thousands of Northern Rock customers, many of them retired, gathered outside branches around the country," it says (it could have been describing its own readers).
Yesterday the government stepped in to stop this very British panic, saying it would guarantee savings in full. The move leaves the taxpayer "underwriting £28bn of deposits", the Times points out.
"Will this stop the panic?" asks the front page of the Daily Mail, under the headline "BLACK MONDAY". Its leader says the government's move itself was a "panic-stricken U-turn", and it likens the chancellor, Alistair Darling, to Corporal 'Don't Panic!' Jones in Dad's Army. But it concedes that the government's guarantee to customers should remove "anxiety from depositors". It also has some sympathy for Mr Darling's decision not to issue a guarantee earlier. "His early reluctance to see reckless, greedy and irresponsible lending institutions go unpunished will be easily understood," it says.
The Sun urges the Northern Rock queuers to "calm down". And the Times' Anatole Kaletsky says the government has "acted in time to avert a catastrophe of Black Wednesday proportions". But the Financial Times is still anxious. "The bail-out may give British taxpayers the worst of both worlds: implicitly putting them on the hook for the entire banking system, while not necessarily reassuring customers enough to prevent the bank run."
The Independent wonders whether Northern Rock's troubles are contagious. It suggests that Alliance & Leicester could be next, after its shares plunged by more than 30% yesterday. "The slump in Alliance & Leicester's shares raised fears of its customers making mass withdrawals of their savings in a second run on a British bank," it says.
* This is an edited extract from the Wrap, our digest of the daily papers.
