Until yesterday, you’d have been forgiven for thinking the outcome of the Coutts-Nigel Farage debacle was a lecture on customer service. City minister Andrew Griffith summoned our banks for a little chat, as if they were naughty school children who’d written swear words on the board.
They’ve done far worse, of course, prompting Dame Alison Rose to resign her position at NatWest after lying to the BBC and writing the driest apology letter in human history. The Government has had to announce reforms, designed to give customers “greater protections” and force banks to explain why they’re shutting us down now with three months’ notice. Though they’ll no longer be able to say “we’re debanking you because your opinions are vile”, I suspect they’ll find another way to say the same thing.
Among all the absurdities of the Coutts-Farage case, perhaps the most disquieting is the complete lack of evidence in the 40-page dossier the bank compiled to justify itself. The former Ukip leader is a racist and a xenophobe, it claimed, a grifter who may have ties with Russia. None of which, oddly, could be named.
What’s happening with Coutts is, I hope, bigger than a state-sponsored reprimand and more so the start of a long overdue reckoning of corporate hypocrisy. The kind that celebrates diversity and laments the class system while courting the royal family. It looks like the tide is beginning to turn on this vile culture of virtue-signalling.
What’s happening with Coutts is, I hope, bigger than a state-sponsored reprimand, more the start of an overdue reckoning
No one is fooled anymore by Shell’s Twitter feed, which makes it look as if it were a renewable energy company, waxing lyrical about wind turbines while pumping tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Or Calvin Klein, which once ran an underwear campaign with a cast of morally righteous celebrities, too busy saying it couldn’t be “limited by other people’s labels” to recognise the labels on its boxers were stitched in Ethiopian sweatshops.
For too long, firms have been able to wrap their capitalist pursuits in do-gooder rhetoric, promising clients that investing with them will help solve world hunger. Anyone who doesn’t align with their “values”, seemingly lifted from the Tumblr account of a social justice warrior at an Ivy League college, must be demonstrably and universally ostracised.
What’s the criteria for this moral misalignment? Nowadays, being Russian — even with British citizenship — is enough. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine I’ve been turned down by all manner of businesses and institutions, who applaud their anti-Russian sentiment as a symbol of moral rectitude after spending decades prostrating for the attention of Russian money.
It all began when the London Coliseum, home of the English National Opera, refused to host the Evening Standard Theatre Awards last year after it had done so in 2018, and again in 2019. It was a classy move, cancelling a 66-year-old celebration of London theatre after the West End had spent two years on its knees due to Covid, all because the ENO thought my family name was tainted.
It’s not enough that I called for the war in Ukraine to end in the first week… I need a new surname, a new passport and a new accent
Thousands of jobs had been lost, alongside hundreds of millions in lost revenue. But the ENO was so blinded by Russophobia it failed the very community that is its lifeblood. In a similarly short-sighted move, the insurer on Directors & Officers at the Evening Standard refused to renew our cover, apparently blind to the fact that behind my name are hundreds of employees who depend on the business staying afloat. We were forced to cover on worse terms and with certain exclusions with an unlisted insurer for an extra £100,000.
It’s not enough that I called for the war to end in the first week of the invasion, on the front page of the free London paper I rescued from financial ruin. I need a new surname, a new passport, and a new speech therapist to train the Ruski accent out of me.
Businesses that were once so far up my backside you couldn’t see their legs are so deluded they feel they can now pass judgement on me based purely on hearsay. It only takes five minutes of due diligence to dispel the moral panic inspired by xenophobic headlines, in The Guardian and the like, which over three years has weaved a fictitious Bond villain-like storyline from pure innuendo. It’s been astonishing to see how far it’s willing to go to damage a competitor, and I wonder, at what point does this smear campaign become illegal? For companies to then base snap judgments on unsubstantiated claims isn’t just bad business, but deeply unethical.
I recently contacted the financial advisory firm Abrdn, which escalated the matter to the head of financial crime. Financial crime, no less! “The business does not have the appetite,” I heard, to engage me as a client.
I also tried to instruct a law firm, Winckworth Sherwood, to help me write my will. It acted as if I’d asked it to draft a contract for world domination, escalated the request to its management board, and refused.
The media has misrepresented my family to such preposterous extent our name is now seen as a liability. And Russophobia has become an easy way for companies to signal their virtue. Neither is this confined to those in positions of privilege. Since the start of the war, Russians rich and poor have both been treated as pariahs.
Most ludicrous of all is the Royal Horticultural Society, which had previously bent over backwards for me to attend events and enjoyed the support of the Evening Standard. This year, it refused to give me passes to the press launch of the Hampton Court Flower Show.
All it took was an inept head of comms whining down the phone line and goaded by bad press.
Much like those in the Coutts dossier, his arguments were hollow and confused — a lengthy, drawn-out euphemism that basically meant “I don’t like you”.
But business isn’t about being everyone’s cup of tea. Corporations aren’t NGOs and they certainly aren’t churches. In fact they’re one of the few places where having different values simply doesn’t matter.
Farage banking with Coutts did not make Coutts racist, any more than Grace Jones starring in A View to a Kill made it a good film. We live in a society terrified of guilt by association and often too quick to judge those we deem to be tainted. Let’s hope, beyond banking reforms, that we grow out of such stupidity.
