Lord Green must answer for HSBC’s sins – but maybe it was always too big to manage

Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a rather Olympian, out-of-the-ordinary figure at HSBC.

This was a bank that traditionally drew its top men from a corps of tough, non-intellectual, front-line overseas bankers typified by the chairmen before Green, Sir John Bond and Sir Willie Purves. As the dominant bank in Hong Kong and a market leader throughout Asia and the Middle East, it was habituated to dealing with customers who took big risks, hoarded cash when they had it, and did not necessarily regard paying tax as a civic duty. But if ethics were rarely discussed in HSBC dining rooms, they were robustly applied — by weeding out bad borrowers and unreliable managers, who moved on to make trouble for lesser banks seeking to compete on HSBC’s patch. That strength of grip enabled HSBC to become the world’s ‘local bank’ (a slogan it dropped in 2011) and second-largest financial colossus.

As for Green, he was a former civil servant and McKinsey consultant who arrived in his mid-thirties at HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong to do corporate planning. We might guess that he did not have many face-to-face dealings with archetypal local customers — property developers, dealers in gold and diamonds, men who made two-way prices in everything from fake handbags to taxi licences — or spend much time drinking whisky with them in Wan Chai nightclubs. But he had brains, gravitas and the high moral tone of a committed Christian who would eventually take holy orders in his spare time. The geopolitics of China’s emergence as a great economic power could have been his Mastermind special subject — and was indeed a prime reason why David Cameron later chose him as trade minister.