DOMINIC LAWSON: I appreciate concerns about the treatment of women in public life but the idea that misogyny cost NatWest boss Alison Rose her job doesn’t bear scrutiny

• Rachel Reeves criticised what she said was the ‘bullying attitude’ towards Rose 

Do any readers think that if the head of NatWest had been a man, he would have been given an easier ride by the Government, and, therefore, would still be in post? If you are of that opinion, you are in exalted company: this appears to be the view of the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves.

In the hours before the ousting of NatWest’s boss, Dame Alison Rose, Reeves defended her record and told Channel 4 News: ‘I don’t like some of the frankly, what I see as, bullying attitudes towards her. She’s the first female chief executive of NatWest.’

Reminder: Dame Alison had briefed the BBC that NatWest’s subsidiary private bank, Coutts, had closed down Nigel Farage’s account purely because he didn’t have enough dosh to meet its requirements. Not only was this a grotesque breach of customer confidentiality, it was untrue: the former Brexit Party leader was able to unearth internal Coutts documents which proved that his political views were, scandalously, at the core of the bank’s reasons for closing his account.

Dame Alison briefed the BBC that NatWest’s subsidiary private bank, Coutts, had closed down Nigel Farage’s account purely because he didn’t have enough dosh to meet its requirements

Abuse

If any low-ranking bank manager had briefed the BBC in that way, he (or indeed, she) would have been fired.

The extraordinary thing was how the NatWest board declared it had complete confidence in Dame Alison, and it took the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who speaks for the 39 per cent of the bank’s shares owned by us, the public, to say this could not stand.

And, by the way, the male head of Coutts — Peter Flavel — was also made to quit: though he, unlike his boss, had not breached client confidentiality, or misled the public.

I appreciate Reeves’ concern about a woman in public life being bullied. The level of abuse that women in politics receive is observably greater than that directed at men. And there is an entire glossary of terms used, foully, to denigrate women, which men never endure.

But the idea that the NatWest boss was a victim of misogyny, rather than of her own appalling misjudgment, is not one that survives scrutiny.

There was an even more spurious example of such an assertion last week, this time from the Conservative candidate for London Mayor, Susan Hall. In an interview with the Spectator, she said of the man she seeks to remove (democratically), Labour’s Sadiq Khan: ‘He’s a sexist misogynist.’

Why did she say that? Because, last year, he declared he had lost confidence in the then Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, which forced her to resign. ‘He should never have dealt with her in that way,’ Hall complained.

Where do we start? It’s hardly unique for a London mayor to dump a Met chief in this way: Boris Johnson did exactly the same, in his time at City Hall, to Sir Ian Blair. And Cressida Dick had presided over a plethora of policing pratfalls.

What’s more, many involved the most depraved examples of misogyny within the force. When the murder of Sarah Everard was revealed to be the work of a serving officer, Wayne Couzens, Dick declared: ‘Everyone in policing feels betrayed.’ But it was the public, or to be more precise, women, who felt betrayed by the police.

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves defended Rose’s record and told Channel 4 News: ‘I don’t like some of the frankly, what I see as, bullying attitudes towards her’

And when two officers had been found to have taken, for their personal pleasure, photos of the fatally stabbed sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, Dick said: ‘If those officers’ actions have added to the family’s unimaginable distress, then I apologise.’ If?

Susan Hall should be careful about posing as a defender of women against misogyny. In 2014, when leader of the Conservatives on Harrow Council, she went on Twitter to mock someone on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here, Gemma Collins, as a ‘stupid fat blonde woman’. Later, Hall posted about Collins, also known for her appearances on The Only Way Is Essex: ‘OMG this fat woman Gemma is ghastly, really ghastly . . . however watching her squeal may be funny.’

What this demonstrates (apart from the questionable nature of the decision of London Conservatives to choose Hall as their Mayoral candidate) is that while women suffer much more than men from abuse within social media, or elsewhere, it is frequently members of their own sex who are doing the dishing out.

Burden

When one combines this with the much greater obligations women tend to have within the family, as nurturers and care-givers, it is easy to see why those who have risen to the top within business, or indeed politics, may well be said to have triumphed over adversity — and are therefore especially formidable. Our most notable example, obviously, was Margaret Thatcher, although for her the domestic burden was greatly eased by the financial security from being married to a wealthy businessman (Denis).

Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) affected to believe in the superiority of women in positions requiring decision-taking.

Or at least she did say: ‘If you want a speech you should ask a man, but if you want something done you should ask a woman.’ She herself did nothing, however, to advance the cause of women at the top — being notably uninterested in giving other women positions of authority within her administrations.

But she set an extraordinary example to follow. If anything, she over-influenced the Conservative Party, in the sense that members seized on, first, Theresa May, and then Liz Truss, as ‘the next Margaret Thatcher’. The latter case might finally have persuaded the party that there is no intrinsic merit in being a woman leader, just as there is none in being a male leader, either.

By the way, the example of Liz Truss also challenges the idea that women at the top will be much more risk-averse than men — and that this, in turn, will reduce the danger of very rash decision-making. This is the so-called ‘Lehman Sisters’ hypothesis.

Farage is a man who, as such ex-PMs as David Cameron and Theresa May have already found out, you take on at your great peril

Advanced after the 2008 financial crisis caused by the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank, and promoted by Christine Lagarde, now president of the European Central Bank, it asserts that if there had been more women at the helm of the big banks at the time, the huge gambles taken by the debt-trading ‘masters of the universe’ would have been held in check by more cautious (and less arrogant) female bosses.

Indeed, Alison Rose had been turned to as the right person to help restore the fortunes of the bank then known as RBS, which had been led to disaster by Fred Goodwin — it required bailing out by the taxpayer, to the extent of almost £50 bn.

The Lehman Sisters hypothesis is highly plausible, in the sense that it is established fact that, in general, women have a lower ‘risk tolerance’ than men. One can see this in the way that men are much more liable than women to self-destructive obsessive gambling.

Peril

However, some fascinating recent research by Professor Elizabeth Sheedy, of the Macquarie Applied Finance Centre, suggests that the more senior a woman is in a financial business, the more her ‘risk tolerance’ becomes indistinguishable from male colleagues of the same rank.

As Sheedy puts it: ‘At the lowest level, you can see there is quite a clear distinction between male and female risk tolerance. By the time you get up to senior management, the distributions almost entirely overlap . . . Basically, there is not a lot of difference between risk tolerance at the senior level.’

This might help explain why Dame Alison Rose took the extraordinary risk of briefing the BBC’s Simon Jack (highly misleadingly) about the banking details of Nigel Farage: this is a man who, as such ex-PMs as David Cameron and Theresa May have already found out, you take on at your great peril.

As for the claim that the now ex-NatWest boss has been treated worse because of her sex, that is a disservice to the cause it seeks to defend. All the powerful women I have known would shrink from such misplaced sympathy, and demand only to be judged by the same standards as the men.

Source: Read Full Article