Forfeiture committee said it couldn’t strip Fred of his ‘K’ in 2009
It’s possibly worth mentioning that the saga of “Sir” Fred is the Forfeiture Committee’s second bite of this particular cherry. Back in 2009, when Gordon Brown was PM, the then Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell asked the Forfeiture Committee to look at the possibility of removing Sir Fred Goodwin‘s knighthood. It was in response to a letter from the then Labour MP, Gordon Prentice. The Committee (including Sir Gus himself and other top civil servants) considered the case but rejected it on the grounds that they couldn’t point to anything that amounted to censure. “The criteria weren’t satisfied,” one former mandarin from the committee told me.
So what has changed? The government says it’s the Financial Services Authority report on RBS, published in December. And that report does blast the RBS Board with criticism. But does it deliver the killer blow for Fred Goodwin personally? At the Treasury Select Committee last week Michael Fallon, Tory MP and aide to the PM, asked the authors of the FSA report exactly that.
There was a painful pause, a hesitation and then one of the report authors, Sir David Walker, agreed … but his co-author Bill Knight told the Treasury Select Committee: “… in terms of individual censure I am hesitant actually. It raises questions about his conduct, but I would hesitate to find a passage in that report that I would say amounted to specific censure of Sir Fred as opposed to his role as part of the board.”
So the FSA did not submit some sort of letter of personal censure on the record to the Goodwin file. It was left to the senior civil servants who sat on the Forfeiture Committee to decide that that is what the FSA report broadly meant.
Chopped off
The Forfeiture Committee, by the way, hardly ever meets physically. Its cases tend to be so “open and shut” and so rare that it nearly always deals with honours referrals by letter.
On another point, I asked Digby Jones, CBI boss back in 2004 when Sir Fred was nominated for a knighthood, if he signed the nomination paper. He said he was asked to by the Treasury but the Treasury went down a different route. He was convinced the knighthood idea originated with the Treasury, then under Gordon Brown, but a mandarin source in the middle of all this at the time told me he was convinced there was “no involvement of Gordon Brown at any stage” of the Goodwin nomination.
People have been wondering who else from the world of banking should get their honours chopped off if the new practice is applied uniformly. I suppose the obvious place to look would be the four bankers (including Sir Fred) who came to the Treasury Select Committee in February 2009 to say “sorry.”
Sir Tom McKillop, Fred’s Chairman at RBS back then, still has his “K.” Plain Mr Andy Hornby, boss of HBOS, seems to have rather missed the boat. His Chairman at HBOS, Lord Stevenson has a CBE, a knighthood and a peerage … for years he chaired the committee that decides who is fit to be a peer, he currently sits on the main committee that decides who should get honours. So he’s pretty safe, I reckon.
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