Stephen Hester was pushed out of RBS for telling politicians the truth

Quite a spell of bowling from the Chancellor last week, skittling Stephen Hester’s stumps at RBS and causing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England to walk even before the new Canadian umpire had time to raise his finger.

The kindest thing to be said about Hester’s innings (enough of the cricket already) is that he made a pretty good stab at bringing RBS back from the dead in the face of fierce political pressure, given that he was never really the right man for the job. By this I mean that even his admirers regard him more as a natural ‘chief financial officer’ — the number-crunching post he previously held at Credit Suisse and Abbey National — than as a natural chief executive of a politically sensitive high-profile business with 100,000 staff, which required him to be Mr Motivator and Mr Media all day long.

What’s more, as the product of a modest Yorkshire upbringing turned millionaire Oxfordshire foxhunter — ‘round-faced… often smug-looking… the embodiment of fat-cat capitalism’, as the FT unkindly painted him two weeks ago — Hester was marinated in the City culture he had been hired to help undo. Like many of his peer group, his career up to the day he arrived at RBS in November 2008 had been ‘all about the money’, as an ex-colleague put it to me. What became an annual ritual of foregoing part of the reward to which he believed he was entitled was painful to watch. ‘It depends whether you think a million-pound bonus is a lot,’ a mutual friend explained: Hester plainly didn’t think it was.

As for the future of RBS, what Hester’s numbers told him over and over again was that maximum value for the taxpayer could only be obtained by holding most of the group together, retaining a viable investment banking arm to service corporate clients, and waiting as long as necessary before selling the Treasury’s 82 per cent back to the private sector, in several tranches and (as he indicated after his departure) probably over a decade.