Fred Goodwin Knight

Fred Goodwin Knight, He presided over one of the worst disasters in UK banking history, starting with buying the rump of ABN Amro in 2007 after the market had turned and finishing with the £45bn taxpayer bail-out of RBS, the ramifications of which continue to this day.

And his knighthood – bestowed upon him back in 2004 – was for services to banking. Services which turned out to be rather less worth shouting about than everyone thought at the time.

So we can be pretty certain that if the powers that be could go back in time they would never have ennobled Goodwin in the first place.

But does that mean that the now plain old Frederick Anderson Goodwin really deserves to join the likes of Russian spy Anthony Blunt, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe among the not so exclusive ranks of those who have been stripped of their Knighthoods? The jury is out….

On the one hand, Goodwin’s performance as a banker was undeniably woeful. A litany of bad decisions and poor judgment disguised as swashbuckling merchant venturing found him out in the end, as such deeds will. So extreme an example was he, as Robert Peston has said, that the removal of his title is both hard to argue with and doesn’t set much of precedent.

Neither did his high-handed manner endear him to many before or after the crash – that and his reputation for getting more agitated about the presence or otherwise of pink biscuits in meetings rather than the risks he was taking with the bank will linger. ‘RBS under chief executive Fred Goodwin symbolised everything that went wrong with the British economy’ as George Osborne said. What politician can resist a point of principle on which they can safely stand, secure in the knowledge that it will also win them public support?

On the other hand there are those who think it craven, misguided and anti-business. Former head of the CBI, Lord Jones, said there ‘was a whiff of the lynch mob about it’ and ex-chancellor Alastair Darling said he thought the decision had been taken ‘on a whim.’

Fred Goodwin Stripped Knighthood

Fred Goodwin Stripped Knighthood, Britain stripped the former head of Royal Bank of Scotland of his knighthood on Tuesday, putting a banker reviled by tabloids as “Fred the Shred” alongside Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu as those who lost the high honour.

Fred Goodwin, elevated to the rank of knight of the realm by Queen Elizabeth in 2004, steered one of Britain’s largest banks to near collapse with the catastrophic buyout of a Dutch bank, a disaster that helped bring on the global financial crisis.

He has become a target of public fury in Britain for his role in the 2008 crash – which led to the government spending 45 billion pounds to bail out his bank – and the lavish taxpayer-funded pension he took with him when he left.

“RBS came to symbolise everything that went wrong with the British economy over the last decade and under Fred Goodwin that’s when it happened and I think it’s appropriate therefore that he loses his knighthood,” Britain’s Conservative Finance Minister George Osborne said.

The decision to strip Goodwin of his knighthood came two days after Goodwin’s successor at RBS, Stephen Hester, announced he would turn down a million pound share bonus that had drawn withering scorn from all of Britain’s major political parties.

A report in December by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulator into the near-collapse of RBS blamed Goodwin and other former RBS bosses, while also criticising the FSA itself and the then-Labour government for lightweight financial regulation.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron expressed satisfaction at the decision to strip Goodwin of the knighthood, while opposition Labour Party leader Ed Miliband – who had demanded a parliamentary debate on Hester’s bonus – continued to call for deeper reforms at banks.

“It is right Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood but it is only the start of the change we need to see. We need to change the bonus culture and we need to change the rules so we see real responsibility across the board,” he said.