A few months back at a fancy dinner in a grand old bank office overlooking Trafalgar Square, NatWest Chairman Howard Davies was holding court.
But he was going on a bit (he does).
From the other side of the table his chief executive cut through the verbiage.
“You were doing really well for the first minute there,” she said, gently.
Davies, former chairman of the Financial Services Authority, all around City big-wig and a man not used to being interrupted, shut up.
To close observers this was typical Alison Rose – smart, likable, funny even. And incapable of listening to male grandstanding for very long. Over 30 years at NatWest she must have endured rivers of it.
Until just a few weeks ago Dame Alison Rose didn’t do bad PR. That is not the only reason she had risen through the ranks, but her sure touch helped. She was at ease, including with journalists. Staff spoke of her warmly.
When she landed the top job at what was then Royal Bank of Scotland, she became the most powerful woman in UK banking. No one was surprised; no one thought it anything other than the obviously right call.
Until this latest muck-up with Nigel Farage, she had barely put a foot wrong. The 54 year old banker was born into a military family in 1969 and spent much of her early life travelling around the world until settling in England at the age of 15. After her student years at Durham University she joined the NatWest graduate scheme in 1992. She has been at the bank ever since, rising rapidly through the ranks until she became Britain’s first female high street banking boss in November 2019.
Rose was well regarded for steering a bank that had been on the brink of collapse when Fred “the Shred” Goodwin ran it in 2008 - and still has a 38 per cent Government shareholding - back to the calmer waters of commercial normality and profitability. For that Rose was well rewarded, receiving a package worth £5.25 million last year.
The mother of two who is married to UBS banker David Slade and the family enjoy the trappings of their well rewarded jobs at the top of British finance. Their home is a large Italianate style Victorian villa in the exclusive north London village of Highgate, where she once had a £12,000 “splinter proof” tree house with a thatched roof built for her daughter in the woodland grounds of the home.
She also had a huge impact on the culture of the bank, giving her personal backing to causes such as boosting diversity and reducing NatWest’s carbon footprint. Shortly after she was appointed she declared tackling climate change would be a “central pillar” of her leadership. New loans for oil and gas extraction were quickly ended.
In September 2018 she was appointed to lead the Treasury’s review of barriers to women in business, leading to an influential policy paper published in April 2019.
Internally the bank changed enormously, with, for example, non-binary staff allowed to identify as men or women on different days in one of a series of LGBT friendly “woke” measures that had already marked her card among supporters of Nigel Farage long before the crisis that ended her career at the bank.
The peak of her career came in the New Year’s Honours when she was made a Dame. Now it lies in ruins, as a result of one disastrous error of judgment.
Susannah Streeter, who has had two decades in the City and is now head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, says: “I do wonder whether the spotlight is being trained on her more brightly because she is a female leader. She has already apologised on behalf of the bank for comments made by the wealth committee and highlighted a need to put processes under scrutiny. That should have been enough to draw a line under the episode and enable the CEO to move on and make improvements, but instead the criticism just became louder.”
One former colleague told the Standard: “‘Alison has worked tirelessly and done a wonderful job over the years and not least in supporting communities on the ground. She always brings commercial nous with heart and kindness.”
Rose concedes she made “a serious error of judgment in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with the bank”, but maybe she was just chatting over a glass of wine.
Male bankers have leaked far worse stuff than this without punishment. Journalistic careers have been made on such chats; no banker CEOs ruined by them.
One non-executive director of another bank said simply: “Alison Rose is brilliant.”
NatWest is one of the most important financial institutions in Britain, a vital cog of the economy that under Rose’s watch has firmly moved away from the disaster left by her predecessor but one, Fred Goodwin and become what a bank is supposed to be – a custodian of our money and, even, good values.
Rose has thorns in her side. Women in the City think there is rather more at stake here than just whether Nigel Farage has a posh bank account or not.
