Coutts has forgotten what the job of a bank is

We now have a reluctant apology from Dame Alison Rose, followed by her even more reluctant resignation. Her departure is a major achievement, but the reluctance is a symptom of the problem. How could she possibly have thought she could stay after she was caught breaking a client’s confidentiality and spreading untruths about him (untruths which the BBC checked with her before publishing)? How could her chairman, Sir Howard Davies, have possibly thought that she could? And still we have nothing from Coutts, the bank that tried to trash Nigel Farage in the first place. Coutts is a B Corp, meaning a corporation which signs up to the commandments of current virtues, such as sustainability and inclusion. On its website, it headlines its B Corp work with the words ‘Doing well by doing good’. Its executives may not be aware of that phrase’s appearance in Tom Lehrer’s satirical song, ‘The Old Dope Peddler’:

Ev’ry evening you will find him
Around our neighbourhood.
It’s