So poor old Fred Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood. Apparently, betting big on a Dutch bank and getting it catastrophically wrong means you end up bringing the honours system into some kind of disrepute. At this point let me remind you that Alan Sugar has a peerage.
As with the question of bonuses at RBS (which, if memory serves turned a £2bn profit last year), so the outrage and ordure chucked at Sir Fred was enough to make one feel slightly sorry for him. Not, of course, that he needs much sympathy but there’s something unedifying about seeing even rich men and bankers throw to the Daily Mail and other members of the wolf pack in quite this fashion.
Mob “justice” is mob “justice” even when it is notionally in a good cause. That’s something you’d like to think a Tory Prime Minister would remember. There is a mean-spiritedness abroad that refuses to let bygones be bygones. On the contrary, humiliation and pounds of flesh are the order of the day.
Bankers are not an especially sympathetic group and Sir Fred’s hubris* at RBS cost him his reputation and the country a largish sum of money. But that’s an argument for not awarding bankers honours (a strange practice anyway) until after their retirement, not one for endorsing this kind of petty revenge. Reversing a previous ministry’s decision simply because not doing so proves awkward or even embarrassing is a pretty poor precendent.
Indeed, this knighthood-stripping business is unusual. It does not happen often. Robert Mugabe lost his but, as a foreigner, it wasn;t a real honour anyway. The only British subject I can think of who has been subject to this kind of refashioned act of attainder is Anthony Blunt. Whatever else Sir Fred is or was he ain’t a sodding traitor, is he? (UPDATE: Andrew McKie reminds me that Jack Lyons and Joe Kagan each lost their Ks too, though again each had committed a criminal offence.)
Not for the first time one thinks of Macaulay’s quip: We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. As then so now. Goodwin is a useful sacrifice to toss to the mob and few people are likely to shed too many tears over his final demise. Nevertheless, kicking a man again when he is already down (in terms of reputation though not, I concede, financially) is the sort of thing that, once upon a time, the British thought was not terribly British. That was always a slightly sentimental view but it’s certainly preferable to pandering to the mob time and time again.
*The problem was less buying ABNAmro rather losing the part he wanted to Barclays and deciding, for the hell of it and more or less on an ego-fuelled whim, to buy the parts of this Dutch bank RBS had previously shown no interest in acquiring. Bravado and the love of the deal were Goodwin’s downfall, laced with a fine measure of arrogance that assumed that since RBS had made it happen before it could and would do so again. Not so.
UPDATE: Being a sound fellow of sound mind, Hamish Macdonnell is on this page too. See James Mackintosh as well.
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