Dame Alison’s ousting lifts the lid on banking’s wider moral pickle

When Dame Alison Rose was a frontrunner for chief executive of NatWest in 2019, I described her as ‘sensible’ and ‘unspun’ and said I hoped she’d get the job. That view was based partly on personal impression and partly on a prejudice of mine, expressed consistently since the 2008 crisis, that women often make better senior bankers than men, being less prone to macho risk-taking.

Rose has now yielded to political pressure and resigned over her role in the false reporting of the decision to ‘exit’ Nigel Farage as a customer of NatWest’s subsidiary, Coutts. But this column has never been in the business of following the baying crowd in hounding corporate chiefs from office. I did not agree with Boris Johnson’s demand, in the Daily Mail, that Rose’s head should roll if (as she finally admitted on Tuesday) she told the BBC that Farage had been binned for holding insufficient funds, rather than for the judgmental reasons revealed in a leaked Coutts report. I’m sorry she’s gone.

There’s no doubt, mind you, that the dame had spun herself – or been spun by Coutts boss Peter Flavel and his ‘head of client coverage’ Camilla Stowell, both of whose heads may have to roll with hers – into a five-star PR fiasco.

But it’s worth trying to understand the wider context. Underlying the Farage episode is the pickle in which all major banks find themselves as they contend with perceived reputational threats of all kinds and related anti-money-laundering issues, on top of pressures internal and external to preach the gospel of ‘inclusion’ and ‘purpose’.

Time was when London banks were full of loot deposited by dictators and oligarchs. Likewise, a global bank such as HSBC might exude high moral tone in the boardroom while its Mexican branch provided facilities for murderous drug cartels.