This English rose smells bad

Whatever Cesare Lombroso thought, physiognomy doesn’t work every time. I’ve seen bright people with stupid faces, and vice versa.

But the face of Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of the NatWest banking group that owns Coutts, can’t possibly belong to an intelligent person. Anyone in possession of such a face has to be a leftie apparatchik, and Dame Alison doesn’t disappoint.

Hers is the face of someone whose creative imagination is circumscribed by bureaucratic procedure and her ability to manipulate it nimbly. Such talents must be highly prized – they earned Dame Alison £5.2 million last year, not bad for a passionate champion of equality.

I’ve already written about Coutts’s ‘debanking’ Nigel Farage, but then I assumed that the bank hadn’t lied when saying Farage’s account was only closed because he wasn’t wealthy enough.

Alas, it was indeed a lie. Since then the bank’s 40-page dossier on Mr Farage has been published, making it clear that Coutts was driven by political, not commercial, considerations.

“The Committee did not think,” went the document, “continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.”

The authors reluctantly admitted that all those articles in The Guardian claiming that Farage was a Kremlin stooge weren’t borne out by any facts. Personally, I wouldn’t have let Farage off so easily on that one, but the point is he wasn’t ‘debanked’ for that reason.

Why then? Essentially, because his political views are different from The Guardian’s and Dame Alison’s.

Her views, on the other hand, are in complete agreement with The Guardian’s, and in some areas even race ahead of them. When she was appointed, Dame Alison proudly described herself “a passionate supporter of diversity”.

She applied that passion to Pride last year, saying: “Our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families and businesses.” One account holder took exception to that sentiment and was promptly ‘debanked’ for his trouble.

Silly me, I used to think that a bank’s focus should be on maximising returns for its investors and shareholders. Obviously, I was wrong.

“And NatWest Group’s employee-led networks are playing a huge part in creating a truly inclusive culture at the bank.” That’s good to know.

And it’s even better to know that Dame Alison has the power of her convictions. For example, under her guidance and supervision, NatWest’s employees are encouraged to identify as men and women on different days.

To make it easier for them to do so, and also to avoid possible confusion, employees may wear double-sided lanyards to inform the world whether they are men or women today. Some work is clearly needed there to make the practice more inclusive: after all, the number of known sexes is close to a hundred. But the general direction is clear enough.

Lest you think it’s all about the naughty stuff, Dame Alison is equally committed to other fads as well. For example, shortly after her appointment she declared that: “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her mission. The bank then ended new loans for oil and gas extraction.

With that woke abomination at the helm, Nigel Farage never had a chance. However, much as I am concerned about his predicament, my own banking future worries me more.

For I too have an account at NatWest, which Penelope’s father started for her when she was a child and I piggybacked when we got married. I wonder if I should jump before I am pushed, for, reading the dossier’s list of Farage’s sins, I realise I’m guilty of each one.

He led the campaign for Brexit; I supported it with lectures and articles. Then again, 52 per cent of Britons voted for it, but since when do we have to go by majority opinion in this democracy?

Then Farage was described as “transphobic” because he retweeted comedian Ricky Gervais’s sketch about those horribly old-fashioned women “with a womb”. Mea culpa: I too found that sketch funny, although I’m not on Twitter.

Farage, according to the dossier, is in favour of Britain leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. He may remember, as I do, that England already had constitutional provisions for human rights at the time when the ancestors of today’s Brussels bureaucrats still copulated with small furry animals in the woods.

Farage, says the dossier, is “at best” seen as “xenophobic and pandering to racists, and at worst, he is seen as xenophobic and racist”. That’s the beauty of the passive voice: it lets nincompoops hide behind it.

Seen by whom? How many? Do any of them read any paper other than The Guardian? (The Independent doesn’t count.) Anyway, I’m sure some people with similar reading habits may see me that way too.

The fact is, Farage once compared the BLM movement with the Taliban, and the comparison strikes me as valid, mutatis mutandis. He is also opposed to uncontrolled, especially illegal, migration to the UK. If such views make him “xenophobic and racist”, then so am I – in the eyes of Dame Alison and her kindred spirits.

Then Farage is known to keep bad company, which is incompatible with the honour of having a Coutts account. He is friends with Donald Trump, despite the latter’s “locker room humour” with its feline references. Well, I’m no friend or supporter of Trump, but I’ve been known to crack the odd locker room joke myself.

And – are you ready for it? – Farage is also friends with Novak Djokovic, the tennis-playing anti-vaxxer. Now, I’m not an anti-vaxxer myself, but I’m friendly with several people who are. So put that black mark on me too.

All in all, functionally and stylistically, the dossier reads like the indictment at the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Except that he was indicted by a duly instituted court, not a bank.

Banks used to be commercial, not political establishments, but they evidently aren’t any longer. Everything is political in modernity, that’s one of its innate traits.

Speaking of politics, Andrew Neal has written a scathing article about this outrage, and written it well. One quibble though: he referred to Coutts’s action as “McCarthyism”.

He thereby used the hare-brained language favoured by the very people he so expertly criticises. Joe McCarthy might have overdone things a bit, but he pursued – in the face of overwhelming left-wing opposition – a worthy and noble goal: ridding American institutions of massive communist penetration.

The likes of Dame Alison are different. They overdo things too, but their goals are neither worthy nor noble. They are subversive and evil.

This gets me back to my earlier question: Should I close my NatWest account before that awful woman does it for me? Worth considering, that. But first I must be sure that other banks aren’t like that or even worse.

They may well be. The ideology of wokery is no longer just total. It has become totalitarian, and there is really nowhere to escape.