There have long been suspicions of the Remaineratis in high places working to get their own back -- classic 'woke' moral campaigns against Brexiteers in the Cabinet like Raab, and above all Johnson, of course.
Now another tentacle has emerged into the light with the debacle over the cancellation of a bank account at an elite bank (Coutts).The bank account is Nigel Farage's.
It is an odd tale all round. Would anyone normally care if anyone had their Coutts account cancelled? You need £1m to have an account there or £3m in investments or mortgage. But the nobs managed to score a massive own goal by cancelling Farage because the Chair of Coutts (or is it Natwest?) gossiped to a senior BBC journalist at a charity dinner that Farage's account had been cancelled because his assets had fallen below £1m, the failure.The journo rang the Chair to check next day.She confirmed. The story ran on BBC News. He claimed his business had been damaged -- and his reputation.
Little did they know the man. He got hold of Coutts' personal report on him and found they disapproved of him personally and politically in quite snobbish terms and claimed he would contravene their (mostly EDI) values. He publicised their report and caused a fuss, and gained a lot of public approval from people who responded to the issue that banks of all people should not really have these absurd moral missions, especially when they were taking serious cash from despotic regimes and making megabucks.
The parent bank of Coutts, NatWest,had been very unpopular in the Great Recession of 2008 under another name (RBS) and had been bailed out by the taxpayers (who still owned 40% of the shares).
The usual stupidity ensued. The leaker apologised.The Board of NatWest expressed full confidence in her. Some hours later she resigned.Some days later so did the Chair of Coutts.
The liberal press has been in a real dilemma over the whole thing. They can't support the banks who are widely detested. But the last thing they can do is support Farage.The result is a classic attempt to make it all into a Pyrrhic victory for Farage, as in today' s Observer
Whatever one thinks of Nigel Farage, back in the news for bringing about the resignation of NatWest’s chief executive Alison Rose and Coutts boss Peter Flavel, he has been instrumental in changing Britain
Balance, you see. However, we must continue to remind the reader as strongly as possible that the chap is an utter bounder. Only we can see through him
An almost anachronistically English figure with his beer and blazers, his Carry On laughter and golf-club rhetoric...A virtuoso on the dog whistle...professional rabble-rouser... a gifted blamer of others... a serial loser in British politics...a born disrupter, a habitual fomenter of grievance with zero obligation to produce results...the loudmouth curmudgeon, the carefree voice of old fogeyism, the bar-room bore who thrives on the national stage...a consummate complainer, because his animating passion is to be against things... essentially a destructive talent....
Most curiously of all:
his populist opinions are not that popular with the British public [says an Observer journalist]
The Observer's sales were 136,656 in 2021
