Coutts and its parent company NatWest de-banked Nigel Farage in an attempt to ‘woke-wash’ their image due to banks having lost touch with the general public, a public relations expert has claimed. And the resulting scandal was made worse due their own “hubris” and failed attempts to “spin” the facts, the PR guru added.
NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose resigned on Wednesday (July 26) after admitting she was the source of an inaccurate story about Farage’s finances. The resignation followed days of pressure on the banking group’s leadership following a dispute over whether Mr Farage’s bank account at the prestigious private bank Coutts was closed because of his political views.
The scandal began on June 29, when Farage first claimed that his bank accounts have been closed. He said the unnamed banking group, which he has been with since 1980, told him it was a commercial decision.
On July 4, The BBC published an article suggesting the former Ukip leader fell below the financial threshold needed to hold an account with Coutts. Mr Farage accused Coutts of being “dishonest” amid a dispute over whether his bank account was closed because of his political views.
A fortnight later, on July 18, Farage said he had obtained documents showing Coutts decided to close his account because his views “do not align with our values”. This prompted an apology from NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose on July 20.
Dame Alison said sorry for “deeply inappropriate comments” in papers that were prepared for the Wealth Reputation Risk Committee and said they “do not reflect the view of the bank”. On the same day, The Treasury announced UK banks will be subject to stricter rules over closing customers’ accounts.
The following day, July 21, the BBC amended its story about Mr Farage’s Coutts bank account after coming under fire from the politician for suggesting he lacked the funds needed to hold an account. Three days later, on July 24, the BBC and its business editor Simon Jack apologised to Farage for previously suggesting he lacked the funds needed to hold an account at Coutts.
July 25 saw an emergency board meeting at NatWest to determine Dame Alison’s future. She resigned from her position in the early hours of July 26.
Dame Alison said she made a “serious error of judgment” when she discussed Mr Farage’s relationship with Coutts with a BBC journalist. And No 10 said that she was no longer a member of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s business council after her resignation as NatWest’s chief executive.
Then, on Thursday (July 27), Coutts boss Peter Flavel stood down to take ‘ultimate responsibility’ for the row.
Now the banking giant has been accused of using “20th-century PR to deal with 21st-century crisis issues”. PR expert Mark Borkowski told MailOnline: “Every crisis that leads to problems that will bring down people is down to hubris and the advice these people are getting.
“They should have faced up quickly to the issues and dealt with them rather than trying to spin their way out of the crisis and hoping it would all go away.”
However, Borkowski said he believes the real problem is that banks have lost touch with the public. And he accused them of “woke-washing” to “paper over the cracks” this has caused.
Borkowski told the Mail: “This all comes from the fact that we have lost the traditional bank manager – the human interface with the public. “That pushes them so far away from reality that rather than dealing with things their customers actually want they go for all this woke washing, which is all just words.
“The rot at these banks has not been fixed, and they’re using certain advertising messages to paper over the cracks.”
Branding expert Nick Ede also slammed the way the crisis scandal was handled. And he warned that it could cause lasting damage to the Coutts brand.
He told the Mail: “The fact that Coutts don’t seem to have thought about the implications of dismissing someone with a public platform is crazy.”
