When Alison Rose was appointed the first female boss of NatWest (and with it Coutts), says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, she announced that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her strategy. Eh? Did she think she’d “assumed control of Extinction Rebellion” rather than a leading capitalist institution? But, true to her ideological posturing, she swiftly ended new loans for oil extraction – a “ruinous piece of virtue signalling” that means we now pay more than £40bn a year to import oil and gas from our North Sea neighbours. And this week, she’s been caught up in another ideological scandal, issuing Nigel Farage a grovelling apology over the closing of his Coutts account.
A friend who used to be high up at the exclusive private bank tells me the furore was “depressingly inevitable”, adding: “the forces of woke have wrought havoc there”. It seems he’s right. Despite bankers admitting in a 40-page dossier that the Ukip leader was a “commercially viable customer”, they decided there was “something a bit whiffy about him”, because some sensitive types perceive him as “xenophobic” and possibly a “grifter”. Of course, there’s no such reluctance over other “unsavoury clients”: Chinese tycoons who put Uyghyrs in concentration camps, say, or Iranian potentates who authorise the “mass hanging of gay people”. But the face of Brexit – “Ugh, let’s show him the door!” The bank’s founder Thomas Coutts – who went to Paris at the height of the French Revolution to help “beleaguered aristocrats” – “must be spinning in his grave”. Would he have considered Farage’s money as good as the next man’s? “You can bank on it.”