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Ian King, business presenter

It has become commonplace for Britons to boo and hiss these days whenever bankers are mentioned.

Many bankers themselves understand this.

Colm Kelleher, the Irish-born, English-educated number two at Wall Street banking giant Morgan Stanley, wrote a thoughtful piece for the Financial Times this week.

He said it was understandable that politicians had made little effort to protect the UK's financial services sector from any impact Brexit may bring.

He added: "A sector that has become associated with bonuses and privilege cannot really expect more."

But Thursday brought a reminder that there are some bankers genuinely deserving of praise and, yes, even gratitude.

Royal Bank of Scotland announced that Ross McEwan, its chief executive since 1 October 2013, would be stepping down at some point during the next 12 months.

He will leave having steered RBS to its first profit and its first dividend to shareholders for a decade.

It is worth recalling the state RBS was in when Mr McEwan succeeded Stephen Hester, the chief executive who had overseen the bank's rescue in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, when it received a £45bn bailout from taxpayers.

RBS had reported a full year pre-tax loss of £5.2bn for 2012 and, while it had been pulled back from the brink, there were numerous legacy issues with which it was grappling.

Meanwhile, due to political interference, the job of RBS chief executive was becoming seen as toxic.

The chancellor of the day, George Osborne, was impatient to step up the pace of the turnaround at RBS with a view to selling the taxpayer's then 82% stake in the bank ahead of the 2015 general election.

To that end, he clashed with Mr Hester over RBS's strategic direction, arguing it should sell its US retail banking arm and slim down its investment banking division.

Mr Hester, who had also had his arm twisted into giving back his bonus for two of his years at the helm, was diplomatic about his departure and the Treasury said it was by mutual consent.

But few in the City and in Edinburgh's close-knit financial community doubted that Mr Hester, who has since enjoyed success at the insurer RSA, had been forced out by Mr Osborne.

In other words, RBS was still in a hole, with few people seen as either willing to become its chief executive or capable of doing the job.

Mr McEwan, a New Zealander who had joined the previous September from Commonwealth Bank of Australia as head of RBS's retail division, was just about the only person willing to take up the challenge.

The extent of the political interference became clear when, shortly after Mr McEwan's appointment, the bank announced a "new direction" that would see it exit US retail banking, shrink its investment banking division and concentrate on becoming the UK's biggest lender to small and medium-sized companies.

RBS also dumped £38bn of its riskiest assets in an internal "bad bank'"known as RBS Capital Resolution.

It was an onerous to-do list.

Meanwhile, the legacy issues continued to pile up, with bills coming in for the past mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance and the mis-selling of interest rate swaps to small business customers.

The bank's name also continued to be besmirched in other ways.

Months into the job, Mr McEwan was confronted with news that RBS and other banks had been criminally rigging foreign exchange markets in the past - behaviour that landed it with heavier fines than it even received for Libor rigging.

There were further glitches in the bank's notoriously creaky IT systems that resurfaced in June 2015 and which required nearly £1bn to sort out.

It is worth pointing out that, apart perhaps from the later IT problems, none of these misdemeanours actually happened on Mr McEwan's watch - yet he was the one who had to spend hours with lawyers and regulators resolving them.

The biggest two legacy issues he had to tackle saw RBS challenged both financially and reputationally.

The biggest penalty for past misconduct, financially speaking, came when Mr McEwan signed off on a £3.6bn payment to the US Justice Department in May last year, settling claims RBS mis-sold bonds secured on dubious US mortgages in the run-up to the financial crisis.

Resolving that particular situation removed a huge millstone.

This is a bank with a far tidier balance sheet than it was when Mr McEwan became chief executive and one largely unencumbered by past misconduct issues.

The second challenge concerned Global Restructuring Group (GRG), a Hester-era division that supposedly restored struggling businesses to health, but which in reality was extracting more money from a lot of them.

It was a ghastly blot on RBS's reputation.

Mr McEwan's handling of the GRG mess was not perfect - he was forced to apologise to the Treasury select committee last year for misleading them over events in the division.

But it is worth remembering that the scandal itself predated his arrival and that Mr McEwan, who set up a scheme to compensate business owners who suffered at GRG's hands, was at least prepared to try and put right previous wrongs.

A similarly ethical dimension to his leadership came when, early on as chief executive, he scrapped "teaser rates" and 0% balance transfers on credit cards that, he argued, trapped overwhelming numbers of people in a spiral of debt.

If GRG was a blemish on Mr McEwan's record, another concerned Williams & Glyn.

The retail bank was formed of the old NatWest branches in Scotland and RBS branches in England and was supposed to be demerged from RBS to comply with EU State Aid rules following the taxpayer bailout.

That plan was abandoned in September 2017 with RBS instead agreeing to make £700m available to support competition in small business banking.

Nor did Mr McEwan manage to make RBS the number one bank in the UK for customer service, another long-standing ambition.

But all of the main legacy issues have now been tackled while the toxic debt issue has also been largely resolved; RBS Capital Resolution was closed at the end of November 2017.

This is a bank with a far tidier balance sheet than it was when Mr McEwan became chief executive and one largely unencumbered by past misconduct issues.

These are huge achievements.

They ensure Mr McEwan's successor - widely expected to be Alison Rose, the well-regarded deputy chief executive of NatWest Holdings and chief executive of RBS's Commercial & Private Banking arm - will inherit something approaching a normal, profitable bank capable of solid growth in the future.

As for Mr McEwan, it is unclear what he will do next but if he fancies another clean-up job, there is one going at , which is looking for a new chief executive following a series of scandals.

If there is any justice, he will depart with the unalloyed thanks of British taxpayers - who still own 62% of RBS - ringing in his ears.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.

Previously on Sky Views: Tom Cheshire - Huawei's 5G network could be used for spying - while the West is asleep at the wheel