Howard Davies and two other heads must roll at NatWest

So farewell then, Alison Rose. When it turned out that the “trusted and senior source” at NatWest who told the BBC’s business editor that Nigel Farage had been dumped by Coutts because he had inadequate funds was none other than Dame Alison Rose, CEO of NatWest, the surprise was non-existent.

In her confession – sorry, statement – the Dame graciously conceded: “I recognise that in my conversations with Simon Jack of the BBC, I made a serious error of judgement…” Er, yes, one could say that. The ethical implications of discussing a client’s financial status with the media are set out around page 3 of Teach Yourself Banking. Dame Alison further admitted that “I left Mr Jack with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one”.

You did indeed, Dame Alison, as did the whole of Coutts’s comical Keystone Cops PR machine in its infantile attempts at damage limitation with the public. And when Mr Jack, by his own account, came back to you the following day to double check it was all right for him to publish the story that poor old Nigel was too short of spondulicks to continue as a customer at exclusive – by which, of course, we mean inclusive – Coutts, you told him to go ahead.

It was a lie. The whole country knows that. Yet that did not prevent Alison Rose from attempting to continue discrediting NatWest with her increasingly toxic presence. Not content with breaking one golden rule of banking by discussing a client with not just an outsider, but the news media, she compounded that breach of ethics by passing on false information damaging to Nigel Farage’s credit status and reputation. Yet she showed no inclination to resign, until she heard the engine of the furniture van revving up outside Downing Street.

More incredibly, the board of NatWest dispelled its last vestiges of authority by expressing its confidence in her. The statement by NatWest’s chairman, Sir Howard Davies, demonstrated the extravagant detachment from reality of the entire NatWest board, on whose behalf he was speaking. “As she recognises, she should not have spoken in the way she did. This was a regrettable error of judgement on her part. The events will be taken into account in decisions on remuneration at the appropriate time.”

To any supporter of free markets, that somnambulist failure to recognise an existential crisis engulfing a major banking institution is terrifying. “She should not have spoken in the way she did…” That sounds as if she had inadvertently snapped at one of Coutts’s top-hatted doormen, rather than fed misinformation to the media about a client. Taking the peccadillo into account when remuneration is next being allocated signalled that the CEO might forfeit her bonus which, on last year’s figures, suggested she would be fined £643,000, taking her remuneration below the £5m mark. Time to launch a crowdfunder for this poor soul.

But it was the remainder of Sir Howard’s statement that betrayed the complete Cloud Cuckoo Land environment of the NatWest management: “However, after careful reflection the Board has concluded that it retains full confidence in Ms Rose [sic] as CEO of the bank.” Is the demotion to “Ms Rose” in anticipation of her sharing the fate of her predecessor Fred Goodwin, who was stripped of his knighthood, or is it a reflection of Sir Howard Davies’ inverted snobbery, as he boasts of never using his title (“I just don’t like it”); so, why did he accept a knighthood?

People who indulge in that kind of BS not infrequently indulge in similar nonsense in other contexts. Sir Howard’s affirmation of “full confidence” in Alison Rose suggests that his judgement remains as sound as when he resigned from the directorship of the London School of Economics somewhat precipitously, having judged it appropriate for the LSE to accept a £1.5m donation from Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif. That was some time after he had served as chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

British banking is in safe hands, none safer than those of Alison Rose, according to the NatWest board: “She has proved, over the last four years to be an outstanding leader of the institution…” What are these people on? She presided over a culture of persecution in which at least 10,000 people have been excluded from her inclusive institution, an unknown proportion of them for political reasons, so that vast numbers of Subject Access Requests (SARs) are about to inundate the bank she has brought back into disrepute, as badly as 15 years ago.

Coutts and Nigel Farage are just the tip of the iceberg. Although the government is rushing to devise legislation outlawing political discrimination by banks, it is already against the law and the opinion in the legal profession is that a lawsuit brought by Farage against NatWest would succeed and result in punitive penalties for the woke bankers. NatWest could take that degree of punishment; but 10,000 such lawsuits? Or more? This is the new PPI.

Yet, having provoked this crisis which threatens to bring down NatWest (we are only in the foothills of this catastrophe at the moment), Alison Rose, with the sense of entitlement of her kind, refused to resign, when even the reticent Telegraph was editorialising that “Alison Rose’s position is clearly untenable.” Of course it was, but by insanely supporting her, the chairman and entire board of NatWest have made their own positions equally untenable. Since issuing that infantile statement they have inculpated themselves as part of the problem.

The same applies to Peter Flavel, CEO of Coutts, and Camilla Stowell, managing director and head of private and commercial clients, with whom Farage chiefly had contact over his account closure. Who thought it was a good idea to convert the late Queen’s bankers, an institution redolent of discretion and gentlemanliness since 1692, into a hothouse of woke intolerance, its headquarters festooned with garish rainbow colours, like a San Francisco sauna? Does the King bank at Coutts? If so, are his advisers warning him to sever ties, discreetly but expeditiously, before the red-tops see the potential for exploiting the situation?

Until Tuesday, a clever spin merchant could have passed off the mounting scandal at NatWest as an aberration on the part of a maverick CEO and some enthusiasts among the staff, implementing damage limitation by sacking Rose and her immediate collaborators. That would have reassured investors. But with the board not only failing to sack the culprits, but backing them in the face of a tsunami of public and political anger, it is clear NatWest is in the hands of people who have no understanding of the gravity of their predicament or how to repair it.

Who would want to invest in or bank with NatWest now? And the contagion is spreading: the Treasury is now investigating Metro, American Express and the Yorkshire Building Society. There will be many more. What was not sufficiently commented on when the facts emerged was the refusal of ten other banks to accept Nigel Farage as a customer. Whatever happened to free-market competition? In the nineteenth century, if a prominent customer had fallen out with Coutts, Lord Rothschild’s carriage would have been at his door within the hour, offering an alternative service. The behaviour of the entire banking community towards Farage is more suggestive of cartel culture.

The Coutts scandal was, from its first exposure, very serious. It represents a more intrinsically corrosive crisis for capitalism than the 2008 downturn. Across every area of life – schools, universities, banks, media, churches, politics, culture – an utterly intolerant, totalitarian movement, small in the number of its genuine adherents, but in control of all the commanding heights of society, is ruthlessly snuffing out our freedoms, our history, our culture, our identity and now, potentially, our personal wealth and the autonomy it conveys.

The snowflakes who stamped out freedom of expression at their universities are graduating and colonising institutions, into which they import their toxic intolerance. The vitriol that pervaded the Coutts report on Nigel Farage, its emphasis on Brexit, now an historical event, and the venomous epithets “racist”, “xenophobe”, etc are the unmistakable vocabulary of the entitled Russell Group snowflake, given power over normal people’s lives and abusing it.

During their Long March Through the Institutions, the neo-Marxist, Frankfurt School left have taken over every aspect of our lives. Elections no longer matter: whatever way the voting swings, Stonewall and the deep state remain in power. The House of Commons is following the House of Lords into the decorative part of the constitution. If a Chinese-style social credit rating system is established, “de-banking” conservatives to make them inoperative as functioning members of society and terrorising others into submission, civilisation will be at an end.

This dangerous threat to fundamental freedom must ruthlessly be expunged. Penalties for political discrimination must be calibrated in hundreds of millions of pounds and banks’ licences forfeited for a second offence. We have to extirpate this insidious totalitarianism by making an example of any institution that victimises customers for their political or social views.

The stakes could not be higher. Yet, so ignorant is the Conservative government of what is going on in Britain’s banking system, it elevated Alison Rose, the woman presiding over the financial emasculation of conservatives at a bank holding 19 million accounts, to a Dame of the British Empire, just six months ago.

The least it can do to compensate victims of NatWest’s bully-boy tactics is to remove that honour from her, as her predecessor Fred Goodwin was stripped of his knighthood. Her resignation as CEO was inevitable and so, since his astonishing blunder on Tuesday, is that of Sir Howard Davies. At Coutts level, the same applies to CEO Peter Flavel and the deeply implicated Camilla Stowell.

Those three more heads must roll if there is to be the slightest prospect of restabilising and rehabilitating NatWest in the eyes of markets and investors. But the obvious and necessary course is not currently favoured in the tin-eared UK banking system and it is likely that the incompetents who provoked this crisis, still in its infancy, will cling to the furniture as tenaciously as Just Stop Oil activists armed with superglue.

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