[ad_1]
Dame Alison Rose’s fate was sealed when reporters checking in with Downing Street and the Treasury were told the PM and chancellor had “significant concerns” about her conduct.
That communication – brief, unambiguous and deadly – was in contrast to the exchange with a journalist that ultimately cost Dame Alison her position as Britain’s highest profile female chief executive.
By Dame Alison’s account, her conversation with Simon Jack, the BBC’s business editor at a charity dinner, was informal, ill-informed and incomplete. It also turned out to be terminal as she effectively talked herself out of a job.
For Mr Jack, a respected correspondent and broadcaster, the conversation produced what appeared a delicious scoop; Nigel Farage had been dumped by Coutts not, as he claimed, for his caustic political views, but because he didn’t have enough money.
That turned out not to be true, leaving Dame Alison under intense pressure when her attendance at the dinner with Mr Jack was revealed by a newspaper.
Coutts had in fact compiled a 40-page report including assessments of his political views and statements to justify a decision taken to ease him out as a customer. It called him a “disingenuous grifter” and worried that the perception he held racist and xenophobic views was incompatible with the bank’s values.
More fundamentally, it raised the prospect that the chief executive of a 38% taxpayer-owned bank had discussed confidential customer information with a journalist. Short of criminality it is hard to think of a more serious charge.
Dame Alison’s defence was that she did not know about the…
[ad_2]
