Dame Alison’s ousting lifts the lid on banking’s wider moral pickle

When Dame Alison Rose was a frontrunner for chief executive of NatWest in 2019, I described her as ‘sensible’ and ‘unspun’ and said I hoped she’d get the job. That view was based partly on personal impression and partly on a prejudice of mine, expressed consistently since the 2008 crisis, that women often make better senior bankers than men, being less prone to macho risk-taking.

Rose has now yielded to political pressure and resigned over her role in the false reporting of the decision to ‘exit’ Nigel Farage as a customer of NatWest’s subsidiary, Coutts. But this column has never been in the business of following the baying crowd in hounding corporate chiefs from office. I did not agree with Boris Johnson’s demand, in the Daily Mail, that Rose’s head should roll if (as she finally admitted on Tuesday) she told the BBC that Farage had been binned for holding insufficient funds, rather than for the judgmental reasons revealed in a leaked Coutts report.