Bankers join the plot against Farage

There was a spell in the brief glorious history of bathroom books when collected works of graffiti would nestle beside Schott’s Miscellany, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche and 101 Uses For a Dead Cat. Christmas presents from the baffled, idle or desperate. 

Among the wisdom the compendia of lavatory wall scribblings could offer were “For refund, insert baby” etched into a condom machine. Or “Whither atrophy?” which, I assume, was from the days when universities did clever.

Either way, an eternal favourite never failed to catch the compiler’s eye as they scoured tile and door for thoughts beyond WHUFC and crudely drawn nobs was “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

I have a feeling we now know it was Nigel Farage who committed this particular thought to paper as he sat in trap three at Boisdale. Whatever you think of the fella, he’s had it tough. Pursued into a pub by a baying mob, milk-shaked, taken off air by LBC and overlooked for a peerage when practically everyone who’s ever met a politician now has one. In a final indignity, he has now had his bank account shut down by Coutts. 

It would be interesting to see who else Coutts has on the books but I can’t imagine Farage is first among sinners. Even, granted, if a penchant for mustard cords must surely be flirting with misdemeanour, if not outright crime. 

Naturally, the architect of Brexit has notched up an enemy or two but his belief that the bank shut down on him because of his views has such resonance that the government has intervened and is asking regulators to clamp down on financial institutions confusing ‘their values’  with a writ that runs in the real world and using them to disable someone’s ability to function in society. 

Bank ‘values’, the cynic might suggest, is one of those oxymorons like ‘police intelligence’ or, dare one say it, ‘journalistic integrity’. The rogue’s gallery that was revealed during the financial crisis when we were all invited to bail out the smartest guys in the room is something few of us have gotten over. Primary among the UK sector was Fred Goodwin’s RBS, owner of, oh yes, Coutts. 

And, of course, the UK financial sector remains unsullied by the sort of Russian money Labour MP Chris Bryant was so concerned Farage might have received and so certain of that he made the accusation under Parliamentary privilege.

Meanwhile, over at HSBC which has in recent times been caught up in a money laundering imbroglio involving Mexican drug cartels, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong has accused the bank of ‘unjustly’ denying access to savings and “doing the dirty work of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Perhaps it is to distract from these capital crimes that banks have embraced so eagerly the corporatised edition of woke social mores, punishing with eagerness the venal sins of others. Even the Bank of England, fresh from its masterful economic forecasting and inflation management, has joined in. 

It is these moral titans who have nailed up vicars who object to Pride flags at the Yorkshire Building Society, Farage for his views on the EU and a host of others who have said aloud what others think. Or indeed voted for. 

But the fact is, one shouldn’t be surprised. Punitive raids by quangos, financial agencies and rogue lawyers were a fact of the Brexit referendum period and whose targets seemed disproportionately to be Brexiteers and related denominations. Most were vexatious and most seen off at cost and inconvenience. 

The banks, however, fell in with the anti-money laundering instrument of Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) to prevent alternative parties being set up and financed. Whatever one’s politics, that is an indictment of our very battered belief in British democracy. 

Now that it’s done, now that it’s over, one could easily see why Nigel Farage – among a host of others – might be sitting athwart and pondering that there’s more to this than meets the eye and reaching with a marker to add to the graffitti.

Boris Johnson might appreciate the classical analogy that, like Carthage, his fields have been salted, his city razed and Nadine Dorries sold into slavery. Farage is being taken down from the gallows half dead and unspeakable things done to him before the quarters are despatched to distant parts of the city walls. 

A little-known fact of drawing and quartering was that before they got to the innards, there was castration. The upshot being chucked into a brazier for the poor bastard on the butcher’s table to observe. There was to be no lineage, no vengeful progeny, no spawn to challenge the regime. (Plainly, this bit doesn’t apply to Boris.)

But it might suit the centrist dads to think the lineage is at a halt. On they go with the narrative that ‘ the adults are back in charge’ and the chaos of populism has ceased. If so, there’s little evidence of their triumphant management. Pick a Western country and things are going from bad to worse. Tin-eared, they can’t hear the political pendulum swinging back even further than before. 

One might laugh, one might think that these tortured souls so publicly humiliated thoroughly deserve their grisly fates. Which is fine until you too dare to dissent and you’re left alone in trap three with the scrawled prisoner consolation: “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

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