Enough said about the fall of Dame Alison Rose; more than enough about the second coming of Nigel Farage. But one question remains: what happened to the Governor’s eyebrows?

In former times, the fate of errant bank chiefs was unequivocally a matter for the Bank of England. Careers were sunk or salvaged by a twitch of the governor’s supercilia. When Bob Diamond of Barclays was under fire in 2012 after the rate-fixing scandal and the Barclays board tried to save him by offering the head of chairman Marcus Agiusinstead, the then governor, Mervyn King, ordered Agius to unresign and fire Diamond – while the chancellor George Osborne denied any part, saying it wasn’t his job to decide who ran Britain’s banks.

Not so nowadays. The Bank of England was busy last week appointing former US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to review its wonky forecasting and slapping more fines on Credit Suisse. But it refused to tell me anything about its role in the Rose affair. According to the Sunday Times, ‘sources insisted [NatWest] had sounded out the usual key players’ before it declared confidence in Dame Alison on the evening of 26 July – the oblique ‘usual key players’ suggesting, to my suspicious mind, that those sources also insisted: ‘Don’t mention the Bank of England.’

All of which frees me to surmise that NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies (himself a former deputy governor) would not have issued his board’s pro-Rose press release with-out first running it past Governor Andrew Bailey or – if Bailey was up a mountain without a mobile – one of his three deputies. And if the Bank’s response was ‘Go for it mate, no sacking offence there, just hold your course’, it made no difference to Downing Street, which sniffed political advantage in swiftly sending word via the Treasury that Rose must go.

Off she went, at 1.30 a.m. – and one version says the ministerial hit was carried out without actually knowing whether the Bank was for or against it. Can that really be true? The Treasury had plenty of skin in the game as NatWest’s 39 per cent shareholder – but that relationship is supposed to be conducted at arm’s length, through UK Government Investments chaired by ex-Unilever executive Vindi Banga, to avoid any hint of political interference. Now, however, we have a major bank accused of politicising its choice of customers while politicians choose who’s fit to run it. And we have a Governor so diminished that no one cares what his eyebrows signal. Dame Alison’s fatal error, as I began to explain last week, was the least of the problems.

Weaker beer, pricier port

‘I’m the man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer,’ sang Paddy Ryan long ago. Fat-cat brewers are currently seeking to preserve sales and profits by lowering the alcohol content in their beers in order to avoid higher duty under a new regime, announced by Rishi Sunak as chancellor in 2021 and effective from the beginning of this month, which will alter prices, product offers and drinking habits across the whole range of booze.

In essence, the higher the alcohol content, the higher the duty: hence weaker beer and cheaper prosecco but a sting on those who offer, or prefer, a stronger tipple. Craft gin makers – a flourishing small-business sector that deserves encouragement rather than tax-grabbing – are expected to suffer.

Likewise, sales of port, on which the duty per bottle, at 20 per cent alcohol by volume, rises from £2.98 to £4.28. Some may claim that as a victory against the shrinking patriarchy who still drink fortified after-dinner wines, but I say livery companies, high tables and aristocrats should start passing their decanters to the right in protest.

New lease of life

City A.M., the freesheet London newspaper for the financial sector, has found an unlikely new owner in THG – an expansive online retailer of cosmetics and dietary supplements, originally called The Hut Group and built into a billion-pound business by Burnley-born entrepreneur Matthew Moulding. Founded in 2005, City A.M. provided fresh reading material for Square Mile commuters, and under the editorships of Allister Heath and Christian May it added pungent free-market opinions. Covid and working from home almost did for it, but it survives as a 68,000-circulation print product from Monday to Thursday, digital on Fridays. I wish it well in its new lease of life.

Warming signals

The UK economy is ‘far too hot’ – says a pundit quoted in the Financial Times – for the Bank of England to halt its programme of interest rate rises. Under leaden skies it may not feel that way, but anecdotal observation suggests definite warming.

Up north, our annual Ryedale music festival was sold to the last seat, despite raised ticket prices, for the likes of saxophonist Jess Gillam and Korean violin star Bomsori Kim. And our Ryedale agricultural show was as busy as in pre-Covid years, despite rain-hit crops and fallen wheat prices. When I asked my chum who sells farm machinery why he wasn’t there, he said: ‘I sold 100 Ifor Williams trailers at the Yorkshire Show in Harrogate and I’m stuck in the office processing the orders.’

As for central London, I watch throngs of presumably unmortgaged youngsters spending freely in Seven Dials. In Soho I note the opening of Manzi’s, a seafood palace in the Wolseley group that was the fiefdom of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin until they fell out with their Thai shareholder, Minor International. Three years delayed, this mermaid-themed reimagining of a dank alleyway site is a multimillion-pound bet on an upswing beyond the inflation spike. It’s opulent but nothing like the original Manzi’s (1928-2006) off Leicester Square, whose shuttered Georgian building, recently a boutique hotel, still forlornly announces ‘Langouste Huîtres Moules’ – and awaits the next cash-rich optimist.