When you're expected in a debate, but fail to turn up, the results can be disastrous. Just ask Roy Hattersley about Have I Got News For You.

So Royal Bank of Scotland may be in for a tricky few days as one of the arch-critics of the way it allegedly treated business customers takes the stand, while the bank's long-awaited response on that topic has been postponed.

First up is Lawrence Tomlinson, who has so many words in his job title – "entrepreneur in residence at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills" – that there isn't quite enough room to add that he's also a disgruntled former RBS customer. Anyway, he claims to have evidence that RBS deliberately put some viable businesses into default to make more profit, and on Wednesday the Treasury select committee will ask him about it.

This type of allegation has been made about banks for years (some former financiers even quietly admit to doing it). But the claims are tricky to prove, not least because failed business owners always want someone to blame. The hope is that the TSC might tease some facts out of Tomlinson, but at least his report contains more detail than the RBS-commissioned investigation by the law firm Clifford Chance. It too was scheduled to be out this week: but now the regulators are interested, we must wait until spring.

Troubles pile up at Carpetright

Not so long ago, City wags reckoned you were just as likely to pick up a profit warning from Carpetright as any form of floor covering. It issued seven in about a year during 2011 and 2012, and while it's managed to stem the frequency a touch since, it still struggles to resist the temptation to slip the odd one out: October saw another, plus the resignation of chief executive Darren Shapland, forcing Lord Harris of Peckham to return to run the business he founded 25 years before.

Still, plenty of the company's woes have been explained away by the state of the UK economy, so now we seem to be booming again, have all those nasty Carpetright stains been cleaned up?

Sadly not. The retail analyst Nick Bubb has been pointing out that the Office of Fair Trading is still investigating the company over the issue of misleading price promotions, but that the slumping sales of its Dutch rival Beter Bed may indicate that the OFT is the least of Carpetright's problems. Bubb's one optimistic point is that the company could benefit from all those carpets wrecked in the recent floods, which hardly seems like a stellar reason to buy the shares. And the Harris family seems to agree: they've been selling.

Looking back at forward guidance

They used to say that Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, was a rock-star banker, but that seems to be massively underselling the suave Canadian. Last week he was appearing on more media outlets than even his newsworthy-again compatriot Justin Bieber, the banker pop-star.

Everybody seemed to want to cover Carney's pledge that interest rates wouldn't be rising early, as he used the great boondoggle in Davos to effectively bury his "forward guidance" policy of linking a rate increase to a fall in unemployment to 7%. The day before, the jobless rate had dropped to 7.1%.

Then the governor gave an interview to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, before doing one with the Wall Street Journal, so it's tempting to wonder if he has anything left to say in his speech in Edinburgh on speculate independence might will, too. Then again, he could pick a completely different subject – this page has already used up its quota of lucky Carney guesses.

In August, we welcomed our new governor with these words: "Here's a bit of forward guidance for you. 'Forward guidance' – as in the pet policy of new Bank of England governor Mark Carney – will end up looking even sillier than its silly name."

Such prescience is guaranteed never to be repeated.