Arrogance of Coutts towards Farage is unfathomable

One of the things one learns from the exposure to large American PR firms is that they are addicted to pithy phrases which mate a sort of down-home porch wisdom with apparently deep corporate insight. “Why’s the hog squealing, Paw?” “Why son, it’s a hog. It is what it is.”

You know the kind of thing. 

I have to concede though that a good one I once hear came straight out of the B-movie drive-in, Lou-Anne clinging ever tighter as the bandaged corpse rises from its sarcophagus, arms before it and a remorseless plod towards the terrified Egyptologists imminent. “Bad decisions are like a mummy hitting air”.

It refers, of course, to the rarified atmosphere of the board room which, oxygen starved by group-think, self-censorship and isolation from the world beyond the pyramid, often violently agrees on some course of action which, on exposure, simply collapses.

Examples are legion and occur most often when ‘bosses’, as they say in journo land, fail to ask a fairly obvious question like ‘how will this look?’. Or, increasingly, are so worried by the way it might look to a gang of mouth almighties on Twitter that their courage fails them and they decide to capitulate to whatever moral microclimate is having a crisis at the time.

Combining both perfectly is Coutts. An institution that once embodied a sort of regal version of Mr Banks from Mary Poppins. Sensible. Discreet. Reliable. And, above all, concerned with the prudent investment, tuppence by tuppence if needs be, of its customers money. 

It has, infamously, fallen out with Nigel Farage and, in so doing, rather blown the gaff on the creeping habit of disbarring people of whom banks disapprove from holding accounts. This sounds a little like the old Soviet habit of taking Communist Party membership from dissidents. No status, no GUM store, no method, no means. The sharp-eyed will notice the irony in the storm troopers of capitalism taking their cue from Red Square. 

When it all blew up, Coutts declined to comment though, of all outlets you’ll be surprised to learn that the BBC and the FT somehow got the notion that the Farage coffers didn’t quite leap the hurdle required to hold an account at the esteemed banker to the monied classes. 

And yet now a dossier has emerged which reads a little like the worst days of Hoover’s FBI. In it, Farage is decried in all the usual terms one might expect in the catechism of modern evils. ‘Grifter’, one straight from social media, ‘xenophobic’, it says of a man once married to a German. An anti-fed under the European bed.  

As I wrote previously, one might agree. One might not. It is fair to say that Farage divides and, at best, might be described by many as an acquired taste. But so what?

The briefest glance at  the exterior of Coutts on the Strand – once a rather discreet dark-windowed and anonymous office building now adorned with rainbows, will reveal that these days it concerns itself more with identitarian politics than the profitable investment of private wealth. 

Well, that’s the impression it would like to give. All banks worship at the idolatrous altar of Mamon. He of money, you remember, the love of which is the root of all evil. Which makes their moral posturing and remorseless advertising attempts to suggest they’re beneficent pals, the more cynical. 

That banks are necessary, that they’re central, that, one might reasonably conclude, they’re desirable isn’t the point. It is a question of knowing your limits. And, in their mission creep, they’ve forgotten theirs. Profitably facilitating lending, liquidity, return and investment. They’re not moral enforcers, their authority for which is distinctly questionable.

Back to that pyramid. It seems inconceivable that the board of the pure which sat down and considered the case of Farage, presumably among others, did so without the knowledge of Coutts’ boss Dame Alison Rose, who heads NatWest which owns the private bank. A woman who leaves the smell of her own moral rectitude and evangelistic fervour as  a perfume in the corner office of each business she’s inhabited. 

At what point, one wonders, did Rose ask herself “How will this look?” For truth will ever out. At what point did nobody think to ask: “Is this our business? Might we be overreaching?” And at what point might it eventually have occurred to her that the arrogance of a bank assuming righteousness in its notion of what people may or may not believe, may or may not vote for, may or may not espouse as long as it remains on the right side of fiduciary and criminal law, is an arrogance beyond fathoming. 

The mummy has risen. It is sinister. It is wrathful. It is frightening. But fortunately it has hit air. And it has crumbled. As so many corporate ventures into assumed rectitude do. Watch though, some bright spark is bound to wake it again. Amateur Egyptologists and corporate missionaries never learn. “We’re doing God’s work.” as one so infamously said. 

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