Stephen Hester was pushed out of RBS for telling politicians the truth

Quite a spell of bowling from the Chancellor last week, skittling Stephen Hester’s stumps at RBS and causing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England to walk even before the new Canadian umpire had time to raise his finger.

The kindest thing to be said about Hester’s innings (enough of the cricket already) is that he made a pretty good stab at bringing RBS back from the dead in the face of fierce political pressure, given that he was never really the right man for the job. By this I mean that even his admirers regard him more as a natural ‘chief financial officer’ — the number-crunching post he previously held at Credit Suisse and Abbey National — than as a natural chief executive of a politically sensitive high-profile business with 100,000 staff, which required him to be Mr Motivator and Mr Media all day long.

What’s more, as the product of a modest Yorkshire upbringing turned millionaire Oxfordshire foxhunter — ‘round-faced… often smug-looking… the embodiment of fat-cat capitalism’, as the FT unkindly painted him two weeks ago — Hester was marinated in the City culture he had been hired to help undo.