Natwest should have stuck to its guns and kept politics out of the City
Even the most trigger-happy of football chairmen usually leave a few days or weeks in between expressing full confidence in a manager and giving them the heave. Natwest board supremo Lord Howard Davies gave Alison Rose a matter of hours.
What happened between the announcement just before 6pm that the Natwest CEO would be staying, despite an “error of judgment,” and the 1:29am statement announcing her departure is not hard to work out.
Sources inside Number 10 and the Treasury were said to be uncomfortable with the idea of the CEO – who had admitted to being the unwitting source of a leak into the finances of Nigel Farage, but who insisted she had not discussed specific personal details – staying on.
Natwest board members will no doubt have received the same push notification from The Times at around 10pm last night suggesting Britain’s most senior politicians had “significant concerns” over her role.
That appears to have spooked the board. What a sorry way for Alison Rose, who has led the bank well and who started her career at the National Westminster, to be deposed.
Natwest should have stuck to its guns. Y
es, the Treasury is a more than 40 per cent shareholder in the bank. But there are sufficient shareholders whose interests are not served by the Bank booting a competent CEO, in the middle of an economic crisis, with no succession plan in place.
That is doubly true when the bank is already on the lookout for a new chair, with Lord Howard Davies stepping down early next year.
There will be plenty of people who believe that Rose, as the boss of an FCA-regulated company who has to be marked on her integrity, should have been let go by the board. Those people are entirely reasonable in their view.
But Natwest’s board, having decided Rose had shown sufficient contrition and that her indiscretion was not significant enough to warrant dismissal, should not have changed their mind within a matter of hours.
It is, even in the part-taxpayer-owned Natwest’s case, deeply regrettable that politics appears to have dictated a vital decision at the top of one of our biggest lenders. What a principle that may set.