Rose has made a stupid error, but Natwest’s decision is fine for now
Polticians getting grouchy about anonymous leaks – you couldn’t make it up. What Alison Rose has confessed to doing, in the white heat of a media storm, was unwise.
Her job at the top of an FCA-regulated entity requires her to be alive to risk, integrity and professionalism, and on that note she has failed. It’s important to be clear, though, about the scale of that failure.
Perfection is an impossible standard. If we take her at her word, this was not a specific discussion of an individual’s finances. It was clumsy, ambiguous and regrettable language that, it’s also possible, an excited reporter with a good scoop may have gone over their skis on.
Now, had she offered genuine personal information to a reporter, she would be packing her bags, and rightly so. There will be some who say it is a definition without a difference to indicate that eligibility criteria is available online, when talking about a single individual. There will be plenty, with good reason, who will think Rose should go.
But, on balance, we think Natwest are right to stick by her. From politics to business, it is becoming the norm for the slightest error to lead to – for want of a better word – ‘cancellation.’
This is a serious error, but is it enough for Natwest to turn around to their shareholders, their employees and their customers and say that they’ve ousted a chief executive who has shown themself to be perfectly suited to the role?
As the bank argued yesterday, the interests of shareholders come first, not least with the hunt on for a new Chair.
Natwest, and Rose, are in this invidious position not because of some off-the-cuff remarks over a rubber chicken dinner, but because Coutts decided to put woke virtue-signalling ahead of the most basic of common sense.
It is Kafkaesque to, behind closed doors, debank individuals due to their political beliefs. If this sorry episode produces one useful outcome, it’s that such absurdities will be purged from the system for good.