When I wrote in July that Dame Alison Rose’s forced exit as chief executive of NatWest in the wake of the Nigel Farage scandal was ‘unnecessary’, many readers vehemently disagreed with me. Out she went, Treasury ministers having steamrollered the NatWest board’s brief attempt to hold her in post – and a subsequent Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) report concluded she had breached data protection laws by revealing to the BBC that Farage had been a customer of the Coutts arm of NatWest and adding the misleading suggestion that his accounts had been closed for purely commercial reasons.

Bang to rights, then. Rose should forfeit the £10 million to which she’s contractually entitled and I should execute a swift reverse-ferret. Or should we? An internal report for NatWest by the law firm Travers Smith gave a different slant both on Rose’s dinner chat with the BBC’s Simon Jack and her underlings’ ‘exit decision’ on Farage – which the lawyers concluded was ‘predominantly commercial’ rather than political and ‘made in accordance with the relevant bank policies’, but not correctly communicated to Farage.

As for Rose, says Travers Smith, she had not seen the controversial 40-page report to NatWest’s reputational risk committee – highlighting his alleged non-alignment with the bank’s ‘Purpose’ – that preceded the exit decision. And she did not consciously set out to make inappropriate disclosures, because she ‘honestly, but incorrectly’ believed Farage had already outed himself as a Coutts customer. Her real fault was that ‘she did not check the position before starting a risky conversation with a journalist’.

Farage says Travers Smith has produced a ‘complete and utter whitewash’ – but his ire has been directed chiefly at its account of the exit decision, with only a sideswipe at ‘the culture created by Alison Rose’. So where does she stand? The report’s sketch of her as honest but naive accords with my own description of her in July as ‘unspun’. Does that excuse her indiscretion? And should she hold out for her full whack of bonus and options? Or should NatWest bow once again to Tory ministers’ fear of Farage and cut her adrift?

In summary, the ‘honest mistake’ that derailed her was a data breach which the ICO judged to have infringed Farage’s rights and which fuelled a PR fiasco that caned NatWest’s reputation and share price. So she can’t expect a sack of gold. But she’s still, in my view, a decent person. I say she should settle quietly for the £2.4 million 12-months’-notice deal she’s already secured and start looking for another job.

On Purpose

‘The culture created by Alison Rose’ at NatWest, with its focus on Purpose with a capital P, has been lambasted by the mighty Simon Heffer as ‘rampant virtue-signalling… to impress fellow members of a progressive elite’. To be fair, it was also a business-driven attempt to expunge the former Royal Bank of Scotland’s reputation for recklessness in its own dealings and brutality towards customers. And it was not Rose’s invention but rather a rolling bandwagon of corporate groupthink that was easy to jump on at the time of her promotion to chief executive in 2019.

But four years later, ‘Purpose’ – meaning a social mission for business beyond making profits – is passing rapidly out of fashion. Even Unilever, whose former boss Alan Jope decreed that shampoo had to ‘stand for something more important than just making your hair shiny’ is backing away from the concept: Jope’s successor, Hein Schumacher, says force-fitting purpose on to every brand in his portfolio is ‘an unwelcome distraction’.

Investors, meanwhile, have recognised that the best companies take their ‘environmental, social and governance’ responsibilities seriously without trumpeting them – but that investing in lesser ventures that blazon their ESG credentials on their T-shirts is too often a mug’s game. What we’re seeing, in straitened times, is a return to first principles of business: making and selling decent products; treating customers, staff and suppliers right; and rewarding shareholders for putting capital at risk.

And that’s a fine thing, because if anyone’s going to solve the world’s challenges – from battery shortages and healthcare at breaking point to benign uses of AI – it is the entrepreneurs of today building the corporate giants of tomorrow. Which is why we’re so excited about announcing the winners of this year’s Economic Innovator Awards in a few days’ time. Our purpose, if we have to declare one, is simply to celebrate the good that business can do.

Petrolheads vs planet-savers

Signs of the times in personal transport. At the top end, Porsche financial chief Lutz Meschke says higher interest rates are deterring buyers of luxury sports cars. This is vividly confirmed by a reader who tells me that six months ago there was a two-year wait from order to delivery of a new Porsche 911, with only a handful available from cancelled orders. But now, with lease and insurance costs soaring through the sunroof, there are ‘literally hundreds’ of 911s on offer via Porsche’s UK website, from £112,000 upwards. Cash-rich petrolheads, this is your moment.

Or perhaps you should signal your planet-saving purpose by riding a Lime bike or e-scooter instead. The proliferation of these machines in London is an example of a trend which is both obviously good, if it reduces fossil-fuel traffic, and a damned nuisance if it creates clutter and hazard – the latter a theme of a recent community meeting in Covent Garden, where I counted 26 e-bikes piled outside the Donmar Warehouse this very morning. Lime is a brand name of Neutron Holdings, a 2017 Californian start-up that claims to have broken into profit last year, chief executive Wayne Ting boasting that: ‘We have an unlimited runway, we have plenty of cash.’ In which case, Wayne, please spend more on bike-collecting trucks to keep a clear runway in my crowded street.