The awful final chapter of Fred Goodwin's story is yet to be told

Times

3 days ago

There is a moment in Make It Happen, the National Theatre of Scotland's new production about the fall of RBS, when a furious Gordon Brown demands that Fred Goodwin be dragged from the bank's headquarters in Gogarburn in handcuffs.
I wanted to stand up and punch the air. Obviously, I didn't. Such behaviour is frowned upon in the dress circle of the Festival Theatre. My fellow audience members would have been black affronted. But still, the thought was there.
I can understand why some London theatre critics gave this show only three stars. They must have felt like interlopers in a mass act of therapy, with the Edinburgh audience wrestling with one of the most shameful episodes in Scottish history.
I know someone who worked at a senior level of the Royal Bank at the peak of the crisis. The day it all came to a head he stepped outside his office in the City to clear his head. On a street corner a news vendor was selling the London Evening Standard, its banner headline predicting calamity. My friend asked for a copy and offered an RBS fiver in payment.
'Nah, mate, that's worthless,' said the vendor. 'They've gone bust.'
Many of the 1,900 folk in the audience on Monday night lived through the hubris and nemesis of Goodwin's folly, myself included. For us, for me, this evening at the theatre was a catharsis.
Middle-class Edinburgh shared in the glory of the Royal Bank of Scotland in its pomp. The money poured in. House prices soared. Michelin stars were sprinkled on the city's eateries. This was a company town and the company was doing rather well.
We watched it all happen in real time. The rise of the Royal to be the biggest bank in the world. The Cupertino-like HQ which opened with a Red Arrows fly-past. Northern Rock. A banking system on the brink of collapse. The bailout by Brown and Alistair Darling.
Make it Happen lands the message that this was a crisis created by Scottish bankers, using a dead Scottish economist as a lodestar, and solved by Scottish politicians. Their hubris was our hubris, pressing all our buttons. Goodwin was the pawky boy from Ferguslie Park who took on the toffs of the establishment. The backdrop to the rise of RBS was the backslapping and self-mythologising of the birth of devolution. Brown's rescue represented what we like to think of as national characteristics: canniness, integrity, smeddum.
There was a moment in Monday night's performance when a woebegone Brown lamented a political age where seriousness was not a prized virtue. Some guy in the stalls shouted: 'Hear, hear!'
My main reaction to the show was anger. In fact I am writing this column the morning after the performance and I am still angry. Why?
In part because Goodwin never was never dragged from his well-appointed office in handcuffs, despite Brown's wishes. It was reported a few months ago that the disgraced former chief executive continues to live in Edinburgh on an annual pension estimated at £600,000. Apparently he enjoys golf at Archerfield in East Lothian, as well as indulging his fondness for classic cars.
That he lives in luxury while the rest of us live with the consequences of his greed sticks in my craw. Our hollowed-out public realm is the price of a decade of austerity caused by the banking bailout.
But the core of my anger is to do with Nigel Farage. Every analysis of the rise of insurgent populist nationalism in this country starts with the banking crisis in 2008. This was the key rupture in the relationship between the public and the political elite. In fact not just the political elite, all elites. Any public confidence that the country's institutions were run by competent people of goodwill was damaged, perhaps irreparably.
Sure, much else has happened since. Brexit. Covid. Truss. But this is where it started. This was the seed. The populist harvest we reap today was sown in Gogarburn.
Make It Happen was written by James Graham, a playwright showered with plaudits for dramatising the mores of contemporary Britain. For TV he wrote the political dramas Coalition and Brexit: The Uncivil War. For the National Theatre he wrote This House, about the fall of the Labour government in 1979, and Dear England, about Sir Gareth Southgate's management of the England men's football squad.
Yes, Graham is English, born in Nottinghamshire and educated at the University of Hull. Some Scots might resent our national flaws being picked apart by an Englishman. I believe we owe him a debt of gratitude.
If I have a criticism of the play it is that the consequences — economic, political, social — are not given their full weight. Perhaps Graham thought he could take them as read. Perhaps he is right. Personally, I wanted to see the enormity of the human cost acknowledged. I wanted Goodwin to look, metaphorically, in the eye of every child whose life chances have been diminished as a result of his actions.
RBS was the Darien of our age. Two decades on, Scotland is only beginning to emerge from this Greek tragedy. Edinburgh has dusted itself down and begun to perk up a little. The city's financial sector has ditched the wide-oh swagger and instead embraced once more the notion that banking should be dull. RBS is now NatWest.