NatWest Chief Executive Dame Alison Rose resigned on Wednesday morning, the latest shock development in a five-week saga triggered by the attempted debanking of Nigel Farage. The Brexit leader has said the whole NatWest board should resign next.
Despite the NatWest board saying it had full confidence in its CEO to carry on after she admitted she was responsible for leaking private information about Mr Brexit Nigel Farage to the UK state broadcaster, she resigned this morning. The development is another scalp for Mr Farage and possibly cementing a new rule in English public life that betting against Mr Farage can be fatal to career progression, as former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Theresa May already found out.
Dame Alison Rose admitted on Tuesday night that she had made a “serious error of judgment” in discussing Nigel Farage, a customer of a bank in the NatWest group, with BBC man Simon Jack but claimed that she had only inadvertently allowed the journalist to come away “with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one.”
The admission answered the longstanding question of who it was in the bank that had briefed against Farage to the BBC, and piled on calls not just form Farage himself, but also from within government for those responsible to resign.
Nevertheless, the bank’s chairman Sir Howard Davies responded to that statement with one of his own that the decision would possibly impact the chief executive’s “renumeration” at a later date, but that nevertheless the board still had “full confidence” in her position as CEO, calling her an “outstanding leader”.
This changed overnight, with NatWest chairman Sir Howard revealing on Wednesday morning that “The board and Alison Rose have agreed, by mutual consent, that she will step down as CEO of the NatWest Group. It is a sad moment. She has dedicated all her working life so far to NatWest and will leave many colleagues who respect and admire her.”
Some questions remain to be asked, particularly in the differences between NatWest and the BBC’s accounts of how the story about Mr Farage’s financial situation came to be in the press at all, implying that someone, somewhere, is still being economical with the truth.
Responding to the development, Nigel Farage reflected that it was clear the basic principles of protecting client confidentiality in banking, as well as UK law were broken in his case and the resignation was the inevitable outcome of that. He said the statement by Dame Alison last night that she had only inadvertently leaked to the BBC was an attempt to “lie her way out of it”.
Nevertheless, this was just “a start” and Farage pointed the finger at the bank’s board of directors which said it had supported Rose despite her admission of wrongdoing, the chairman Sir Howard Davies, and the CEO of Coutts Peter Flavel, the exclusive banking house in the NatWest group which handled Mr Farage’s business and terminated his account over his political views. He said they should also all resign.
Farage told his broadcaster GBNews on Wednesday morning: “…it was the board that sanctioned this culture. A culture that talks about diversity and inclusion, but actually is very divisive, and in my case — as you can clearly see — is pretty poisonous stuff. I think any board member that endorsed that statement last night, which said that she breached confidentiality but she can stay? Frankly, I think the whole board needs to go.”
Farage also decried Rose’s claims that she wasn’t aware of what was going on at her bank and didn’t agree with what was said about Mr Farage in the bank’s internal document, saying that it was in fact her that pushed to introduce the new culture at the bank, transforming NatWest from a finance house to a “moral arbiter, virtually a political organisation”.
This story is developing and more follows
