Then Hoare and Co started charging monthly banking rates.
Eventually, the nice man on the end of the phone became so used to one of us calling to cancel the latest lost debit card that he’d chuckle, even if it was midnight, and say ‘Is that one of the Money-Coutts sisters?’ I had to call the number often because I lost my debit card regularly as a student. It had a very old and beautiful branch on Fleet Street, rumoured to have been the inspiration for Gringotts, the wizard’s bank in Harry Potter, and there was a phone number you could ring whenever you liked – any time of day or night - and someone would answer it within a couple of trills. Then Dad left Coutts, and our accounts moved to a different private bank which came with similar perks.
“Coutts! And you’re Money-Coutts! Ha ha!” Our jokes were fractionally less sophisticated back then. I only had one because my father worked for Coutts at the time, but it seemed to be a regular source of amusement when people saw my name on the card. If we met boys from Radley at Pizza Hut in Oxford, the bill would come and dozens of Coutts cards would rain down on the silver platter in order that we could pay £8.27 each for our share of a stuffed crust and a diet Coke. To be fair, this wasn’t that unusual at boarding school. Many years ago, as an immensely spoiled teenager, I had a Coutts account. Nigel, I get it.īelieve me, I understand because I suffered the same fall from grace. I suspect he’s suffering from banking anxiety and the fear of all his friends laughing at him in the clubhouse when he offers to pay for a round, and has to pull out a high-street debit card from his wallet instead of a nice Coutts one with the swirly letters across the top. They’ve offered a bog-standard Natwest account, apparently (Natwest being the bank that owns Coutts), but Nigel appears to have poo-pooed this. Coutts needs customers with over £3 million in assets, or to borrow or invest at least £1 million with the bank, and, although protesting, it sounds like Nigel’s come up short. But basically that means he’s not rich enough. According to the BBC, Nigel “fell below the financial threshold required to hold an account at Coutts”. Various theories were put forward (Was it for political reasons? Had Nigel been taking money from Russia?), until a couple of days later when a source told the BBC that Nigel’s account had been closed because he wasn’t rich enough. It was “serious political persecution” at the highest level, he declared, which may sound overblown, but there’s no telling how any of us would react if our cards were suddenly useless and we couldn’t nip down to the pub for a pint of Spitfire and a chat about immigration, or furnish our wardrobe with another tweed blazer. The clue came in his angry statement: “I’m with one of the subsidiaries of this big banking group, one with a very prestigious name,” Nigel thundered, as much as a man who’s recording a YouTube video in his sitting room while wearing a pale pink tie can thunder. Poor old Nigel’s been thrown out by his bank and, rumour has it, the bank is Coutts. On further investigation, however, it turned out I was safe and the drama related to Nigel Farage.
Had I said something controversial about superyachts or labradors? Was it my turn to be cancelled? Narcissistic to assume this was related to me but there has been the odd online incident before. I felt clammy panic for a second last week when I saw the word “Coutts” trending on Twitter.
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