‘Dear valued Coutts customer, following unhelpful media speculation, we would like to assure you that, in keeping with our reputation as an inclusive bank, loathsome high net worth individuals will always find a warm welcome here, along with the utmost client confidentiality…”
Tricky. What can Coutts do to convince customers it doesn’t, as a rule, compile pages of insults about non-progressive ones, prior to “exiting” the most hateable via a secret “glide path”. How can it prove that it never, or almost never, relies, unbeknown to clients, on literature about them by hostile organisations, or scans Twitter accounts for comments incompatible with its values? Well, some of its values. Like Groucho Marx with his principles, Coutts has others. If they won’t serve you in the Strand, they might take your money at NatWest.
By way of averting what might be the first indignation-based run on a bank, should it mention how Coutts once offered its services to a Brunei royal later accused of embezzling £15bn? Can it be accused of virtue signalling if Prince Andrew banks there? Or of being picky, considering Piers Morgan?
Before documents obtained by Farage showed that he was kicked out as much for being politically repellent as – as the BBC had been told – for reasons of Coutts-defined poverty, Morgan tweeted: “As a Coutts client myself I suspected this might be the real story. Need to borrow a few quid, @Nigel_Farage?” Jon Sopel, selflessly adding to the schadenfreude, has apologised for a similar jibe: “Am thinking of starting a ‘go fund me’ page for Nige to get him his account back.”
The saga of Coutts v Farage, in that sympathy is wasted on any of the participants, may be the closest real life has come to reproducing the pleasure of rich-baiting entertainments like The White Lotus or Succession. That Farage was wronged by the bank is clear, an important discovery, and the least sad-making thing in the world. At the same time that they expose the bank’s outrageous approach to vetting, the Farage documents can’t but remind you of how ghastly he is – though, admittedly, being a woman as well as a Remainer I’m biased. In fact I’m indebted to the Coutts research (where the offence is listed under “Other”) for the bit where Farage says women with a family are worth less, in banking, than male workers. It prompted a check on how equal things have become at NatWest since 2022, when, as its chief people and transformation officer explains, it “refreshed our company values”, and “placed ‘inclusive’ right at the top of the list”. The group’s latest gender pay gap is a mean 31.8%. The gender bonus gap is 43.5%.
There was additional concern at Coutts that Farage had trivialised Trump’s pussy-grabbing boasts (“locker room banter”). Given that the Farage report goes back to his schooldays, its authors will understand if some women think it’s a bit soon for Coutts to overlook its own willingness, between 2015 and 2018, to employ a banker, Harry Keogh, alleged to have harassed female colleagues, an episode the then chair of the women and equalities committee called “completely unacceptable”.
In some important ways, not just financial, Farage was a possibly better fit, chez Coutts, than will be successors drawn from its new friends at Left Foot Forward. Either way, it’s unfortunate that the people most likely to switch to the UK’s only anti-Farage bank will have mainly rectitude to recommend them. When they actually need £1m. Although, given the possible impact of Fexit, who knows? If enough self-exiting plutocrats force Coutts to reduce the minimum investment to a tenner, its concierge service could yet find itself sourcing hampers for Hope Not Hate rallies. Until then, the bank must deal with its card’s new status as a signifier, in all but the most enlightened political circles, of corporate idiocy.
Still, Coutts got one thing right. Repeatedly, in the 40 pages recording why Farage – unlike, say, General Pinochet – is unworthy of its services, the bank registers the reputational risks of eviction: “it is very likely the client would ‘go public’ if we exited him”. Alas, other than the evidence that the bank had come to believe in its own righteous marketing, the documents shed little light on the strange decision to de-Farage, when most people knew nothing about his bank but would quickly recognise the implications of sacking clients for personal opinions frowned on by financiers. Maybe, having successfully buried episodes that surely rival in reputational terms Farage’s ravings, Coutts considered his protests relatively unchallenging. What is one enraged “grifter” (as it calls Farage) compared with its now-forgotten 6.5m Swiss francs (£5.8m) fine over money laundering, the £8.75m one over handling the proceeds of crime, its management of tax haven structures, and alleged connection with the Global Laundromat?
The excommunication of Farage might even have appeared a useful look for a bank that, with an eye on the younger rich, likes to portray exclusive banking as winsomely philanthropic. “In 2021 we built a sustainable working garden on the roof.”
If so, Coutts overlooked the possibility that zealous virtue signalling, the very strategy that helped separate its reputation from a laundering- and harassment-troubled past, might actually be blamed for Fexit; might be ridiculed as typical of otherwise unreconstructed corporations monetising borrowed values. In Woke, Inc., a study of this tendency, Vivek Ramaswamy argues that “big business has figured out that it can make money critiquing itself”. Look at the acclaimed Fearless Girl statue, celebrating “the power of women in leadership” – erected by an asset management company that paid millions to settle claims it discriminated against female employees.
Coutts, aware that Farage might embrace martrydom, included in his charge sheet attitudes that lead to outcomes exactly like NatWest’s huge gender pay gap. It somehow forgot, whatever “grifting” it objects to, that Farage has yet to be done for money laundering. Who would want the embarrassment of one of its cards?
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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