How Nigel Farage forced out NatWest chief

The ousting of NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose was sealed after midnight on a hastily-arranged board conference call following a personal intervention from the prime minister.

The departure followed a month of turbulence for Rose, who had become the target of a vendetta waged by Nigel Farage over the closure of his bank account at Coutts, the prestigious wealth manager owned by NatWest.

Her fate was decided once Rishi Sunak’s government, which owns a 39 per cent stake in the lender, sided with the hard-right populist over his claims he had been punished for his political views.

“The prime minister was concerned about the unfolding situation. Alison Rose has done the right thing in resigning,” Sunak’s spokesperson said after she fell on her sword.

Rose, who became the first woman to run a “big-four” British lender in 2019, had also become the first high-profile business casualty of UK’s increasingly divisive politics.

Before her clash with Farage, Rose was at the pinnacle of her career and in January was awarded a Damehood from King Charles, the most notable client of Coutts.

Seven months later, the 53-year-old was forced to resign after confessing to leaking misleading information about why Coutts jettisoned former Ukip leader Farage — ironically partly because of the reputational risk his politics represented for the bank.

Chair Howard Davies vowed to stand behind her, assuring her of his “full confidence” in a statement on Tuesday. But eight hours later, in the dead of night, his support had withered.

The flip-flop happened after Sunak and UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt let it be known they had lost faith in Rose, prompting the fateful late-night virtual board meeting.

“Extraordinary misjudgment by the board to issue [that statement] and then have to go into a midnight session,” said a rival banking executive. “One of the most humiliating U-turns the City has ever seen.”

“This whole thing has been bungled from start to finish,” said another. “It’ll be a case study for comms teams for years to come on what not to do.”

However, people briefed on the chain of events say Davies ran the statement past the government and regulators before its publication. The board was shocked when politicians pulled the rug after reading her statement and seeing the backlash it provoked.

A Treasury spokesperson said that the decision was “made by the NatWest board and Alison Rose. The NatWest board is responsible for the bank’s strategic and operational management.”

But Sunak and Hunt’s change in stance was fatal: the state is NatWest’s largest shareholder after the lender’s £45.5bn taxpayer bailout in 2008.

After a conversation with Treasury officials, at around 10.30pm Davies reconvened the board on a call from the bank’s Bishopsgate headquarters in London. Within hours an exhausted Rose agreed to resign, two days before the bank’s second-quarter earnings release.

Her allies say she has been “extraordinarily poorly treated” and losing her job was “disproportionate” to the mistakes she made.

“If you look through the corporate news canon there are many more astonishing cases,” one added. They referred to ex-Barclays CEO Jes Staley surviving his attempts to unmask a protected whistleblower and the boss of P&O Cruises hanging on after breaking the law by firing 800 crew over Zoom.

Rose, however, faced one of the savviest British political operators in recent history, who seven years ago brought down a sitting prime minister — David Cameron — over Brexit.

The row began on June 29, when Farage revealed his bank accounts with an unnamed “prestigious institution” were being closed in a case of “serious political persecution”. He later named Coutts as the culprit, adding a dozen other lenders had refused to take him on.

Farage’s claim appeared to be undermined after the BBC reported on July 4 that the real reason Coutts was shutting his account was that he had fallen below its £1mn borrowing limit. The story emphasised that the decision was solely commercial.

Farage has admitted that he dipped below the threshold after repaying a mortgage.

But last Wednesday he revealed the contents of a 40-page dossier showing Coutts had been discussing how to cut ties with Farage for months. His politics were “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”, the report concluded.

Most damaging were the minutes of the Coutts reputational risk committee, which described Farage as “pandering to racists” and a “disingenuous grifter”.

A day later, Rose issued an apology and promised to oversee a full review of processes at “the King’s bank”.

The tactics failed. Not least because it had already emerged that Rose had sat next to the BBC reporter at a charity dinner on July 3 at London’s Langham Hotel, the night before his report was published.

On Tuesday evening, Rose confessed to being the single source of that report.

Farage managed to emerge as a political victim. Even Labour leader Keir Starmer said the anti-immigration, anti-EU politician had been wrongly treated. Conservative ministers including PM Sunak accused Coutts of undermining free speech. The Treasury expedited new rules forcing banks to give longer notice periods and clearer explanations when dropping clients.

Until Rose’s admission, the government had intended to remain largely hands-off. “We wouldn’t get involved in something like that, we are minority shareholders, and the bank has operational independence,” said one official. 

But when the board’s statement of support was published, the mood shifted, notably because it raised the possibility that Rose had breached client confidentiality laws.

“Many jaws in government hit the floor when we saw the ill-judged first board statement,” said one minister.

Some in government hoped she could still survive. Rose had political allies. She had been named on Sunak’s 14-strong business council, led a government review into female entrepreneurship and chaired the Energy Efficiency Taskforce. “I don’t think people will want to throw her under the bus,” one cabinet minister confided on Tuesday.

But Number 10 and Number 11 eventually agreed her position was untenable.

“There was not an explicit demand for her resignation,” said a senior government figure. “It was more a case of handing the board a loaded revolver and leaving them to it.”