By forcing the resignation last night of NatWest chief executive Alison Rose, who has quit for leaking about Nigel Farage’s bank affairs, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has achieved three things.
Firstly, it makes him look strong at a time when he is more often accused of being weak. Undoubtedly, Rose would still be in her job only for the swift intervention on Tuesday evening of Sunak and his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.
The second victory for the prime minister is that he has gazumped his predecessor-but-one and chief tormentor, Boris Johnson, who was first out of the traps last week to lead calls for Rose’s head over for the leaking to the BBC of incorrect details over why a NatWest subsidiary axed Farage as a client.
The third of Sunak’s hat-trick of wins from the affair is that it has put him on the winning side of the kind of “anti-woke” culture war issue – Farage’s right to hold politically incorrect views without persecution – that the Conservative Party plans to use to rally its base in advance of the next election.
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The root of the furore that has cost the job of one of Britain’s top bankers lies in the recent decision of the Royal-linked bank Coutts, which is owned by NatWest, to close former UKIP leader Farage’s account against his wishes. He complained at the end of June that it was done for political reasons.
On July 3rd, Rose sat next to the BBC’s business editor, Simon Jack, at a media dinner. She has since admitted that she told him that Farage’s account was closed because he wasn’t wealthy enough. This was both a clear breach of client confidentiality, and also inaccurate, as documents later released by Farage proved. An internal bank report cited his allegedly “xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views”.
The BBC’s incorrect story based on Rose’s information led to Farage being ridiculed. The architect of Brexit and serial political campaigner was never going to let it go.
After Farage obtained and then released the internal bank report that cited the true, and undeniably political, reasons for his “debanking”, the pressure built slowly on Coutts, NatWest and Rose over the last week and a half. At 5.45pm on Tuesday she finally admitted being the dodgy source for Jack’s story. With an apology and a somewhat weak explanation of her actions, she tried to hang on to her job with the full backing of the NatWest board. Then Sunak and Hunt stepped in.
By 9.45pm, Sunak and Hunt’s offices were briefing newspapers including the Sun and the Times (and presumably also warning the bank) to suggest they were unhappy that Rose had clung to her job. The government’s displeasure carried even more weight than usual because taxpayers own 39 per cent of NatWest.
By 11pm on Tuesday, the bank’s board, which had backed Rose five hours earlier, was meeting to agree her exit, which was announced at 1.30am. Given she had previously won the board’s support, the deciding factor was the intervention of Sunak’s government.
It was the Telegraph last Wednesday that first revealed Rose had sat next to Jack the night before his Farage story, but it was Johnson two days later who took the headlines by stating outright that he suspected her as the source of the story. The former prime minister said he would “wager the contents” of his own bank account that she was behind it and he said she “really needs to go”.
Johnson’s intervention raised the temperature around Rose to boiling point. At the time, she still sat on his successor and rival’s council of business leaders, from which she only resigned this morning. Yet Sunak can now credibly claim that it was his interventions that finally forced her to go.
Finally, the Conservatives’ narrow win last week in the byelection for Johnson’s old seat, due to voter worries over pro-climate and anti-car taxes championed by Labour’s Sadiq Khan, appears to have convinced Sunak that he can staunch his party’s electoral losses if he focused on divisive, “anti-woke” and culture issues. The Sunday newspapers in Britain were all briefed as such last weekend, with numerous reports of how Sunak planned to hem in Labour by exposing it on issues such as transgender rights and the cost of climate measures.
The apparent vindication of Farage’s right to free speech – even when it is viewed by some as being a little unsavoury – without having his bank accounts closed is precisely the sort of red-meat issue that Sunak hopes will stir his troops, and launch a fightback against Labour.
It is a bad day for Rose and NatWest, but a good one for Sunak.