Latest news with #FredGoodwin
Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The awful final chapter of Fred Goodwin's story is yet to be told
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.
The Guardian
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Make It Happen review – Brian Cox haunts RBS's Fred Goodwin in sparky financial crisis musical
There have been some high-profile dramas about the fiscal greed and corruption that preceded or precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, from The Lehman Trilogy to Enron. James Graham's musical, premiering at the Edinburgh international festival, is at least as epic, even if it bites off more than it can possibly chew. It takes us back to the real-life drama of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the government bailout after its collapse. Fred Goodwin was CEO and the bank had such a meteoric rise under his tenure that it claimed to be the largest in the world. Graham works hard to make the banking part of the story snappy – and succeeds. Directed by Andrew Panton, it is pacey even if long, serious but funny, all set to song and kinetic projections across towers on Anna Fleischle's set which might be inflated columns of the share index. There is musical comedy even as the singing chorus presides over Goodwin's fall; darker satire as banking culture is captured, complete with after-hours karaoke nights (Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out, Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head etc). This is a moment in economic history when bankers such as Goodwin (Sandy Grierson) become emperors, trumping the power of parliament, so it seems. Grierson plays a fascinatingly bland tyrant, looking every bit the accountant he is by training. But like his office lover, Rita, says, he is a lion lying in the grass. When he reveals himself as such, he is ruthless indeed: a white-collar Scarface, high on power. Graham gives Goodwin's tale the ancient Greek treatment at times, with ghosts, hallucinatory hissing characters and the emergence of what seems like an underworld beneath the cracked reality of banking life. From this, amid rumbles and puffs of smoke, Brian Cox emerges as the spectre of moral philosopher and founder of free market economics, Adam Smith. He is entertaining rather than fearful and seems knowingly to be Brian Cox the actor playing Smith the character. In between discussions on Smith's 'invisible hand' the tone flips back into a comical vein. Smith admires Goodwin's scented candles and develops a penchant for John Lewis. There is a satirical diversion into A Christmas Carol territory, with a snowy night-time trip across Edinburgh, that serves no greater purpose. It is entertaining nonetheless, and Cox amuses as Smith. Some of the antithetical elements do clash and dilute meaning. Is this a play about hubris, you wonder, or a satire of it – or is it attempting to grapple with the nature of capitalism itself rather than just Goodwin's legacy? Its scope is so broad, its characterisation broad-brush too and there is not enough drama to Goodwin's actual downfall. Some balls are dropped, such as Goodwin and Rita's relationship – its trajectory all but abandoned after one comical sex scene. Yet Graham's marshalling of material is impressive overall, and it is a miracle that the flips from comedy to Gothicism and back do not jar. Graham has, as always, done his homework on the subject, meticulously so. Co-produced by Dundee Rep theatre, and set in Edinburgh, there is knowing local humour (Leith is labelled an underworld, New Town is heaven, for example). Scottish statesmen stand at the centre of No 10 politics: Alistair Darling is amusingly drawn. Gordon Brown becomes something of an ethical touchstone, the hero of the piece here even though, as Goodwin points out, it was Brown who gave him the freedom to take RBS down the disastrous road that he did. Everyone is flatly drawn, though that does not impede the enjoyment. There are explanations of Adam Smith's philosophies, the sub-prime mortgage crisis and capitalism itself, but the fourth wall is never pierced. Characters often face the audience while delivering a mini treatise, and it is miraculous too that this does not seem like heavy-handed exposition. It becomes clear that Goodwin follows the word of Smith's ideas but not the spirit. This is what leads him to his amoral drive towards acquisition. We hear how he only read one of Smith's books – not the one that spoke of the ethics of the free market. It is a funny turn in the narrative, but too flip to be convincing. Goodwin's fall never really comes either, dramatically. He stares out at the audience defiantly, even as the lights go down. There is no remorse, no learning. It's chilling but also anti-climatic. Yet still sparky and exuberant as Graham's plays always are, with heaps of knowledge, humour and sharp lines. It sprawls, turns eccentric corners and defies expectations. Its ambition, and epic scope, is simultaneously a strength and weakness. At Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until 9 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Daily Mail
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
He's shredded! Brian Cox delivers a VERY public flogging for Britain's most odious banker
In days gone by there were designated areas in Scotland's capital for public floggings – the Grassmarket for example, or Mercat Cross. These ritual spankings were administered on behalf of the good people who, in their outrage at transgressions beyond the pale, demanded brutal satisfaction. Few of us may have the stomach for them today. But a 21st century spanking is taking place nightly in Edinburgh a short walk from the spots where the old ones used to happen. The new location is the Festival Theatre. There's scarcely a spare seat to be had. Granted, the villain of the piece – a Mr Fred Goodwin – takes his beating in absentia, although he would be welcome to buy a ticket if penitence were his thing, which we know it isn't. But a spanking is what it indubitably is – two hours and 40 minutes of metaphorical thwacks to the bare bottom of Britain's most odious banker. And who does the flogging? Scottish actor Brian Cox, for one – appearing as the ghost of economist Adam Smith and tearing a strip off Fred the Shred. Did we onlookers have the stomach for it? Hell yes. Was there amusement to be had in an early retiree's humiliation before an audience of his hometown peers? We laughed like drains. When it was over, there was a standing ovation. People left the auditorium smiling, brutal satisfaction delivered. That Goodwin fellow? He had it coming. Make it Happen – the title of this 'fictionalised satire' by James Graham – is what the former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) chief executive used to say when he was delegating. It might be responsibility for redecorating the lobby outside his office with £1,000 a roll wallpaper or having fresh fruit flown in daily from Paris. What he memorably made happen under his own steam was the implosion of a centuries-old bank, the loss of 26,000 employees' jobs and the saddling of the taxpayer with a multi-billion-pound bill. Then he made his exit stage left happen – along with his six-figure pension pot. I caught the play's Edinburgh Festival premiere this week, joining almost 2000 others for a delicious form of revenge therapy. True, not all the charges libelled here are strictly accurate. There is no record of Goodwin actually leaning on Edinburgh's Lord Provost to persuade John Lewis to give up their flagship Scottish to facilitate the expansion of his city centre empire. It may be a stretch to suppose Goodwin sacked an underling simply because she had neither Prime Minister Gordon Brown nor Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on speed dial. Did Goodwin really tell his mistress 'talk dirty' during stolen moments in flagrante in an office cupboard – and would such dirty talk really have been a stream of banking buzz words? Speculation at best. But, of course, this is fiction – apart from all the stuff that is horrifying fact. Indeed, much of the fun here derives from identifying the line between the two. You may assume it fanciful that, at the crazed height of the Goodwin expansionist era, the bank's assets included a graveyard in the American deep south. It really happened. Is a spot of artistic licence employed in nicknaming the morning meetings with the bullying CEO the 'morning beatings'? Nope. That is how they were known. It all begins inauspiciously enough when a diffident Goodwin arrives for an interview in Edinburgh with RBS CEO George Mathewson who is looking for his heir apparent. Awkward and with west coast, working class vowels, he seems a poor fit. To Edinburgh's preening banking establishment he is a coarse outsider from – horror of horrors – a council estate in Paisley's Ferguslie Park. But Goodwin impresses with his masterplan to stave off takeovers and maintain the bank's proud name: 'To stay independent,' he declares, 'you have to grow …' And so the madness begins. You may wonder how a financial institution's growth era can possibly be reproduced on a bare stage – even why anyone would attempt it. Well, having your cast burst into song seems to help. If it sounds bonkers, you soon remind yourself it is no more bonkers than the events being depicted here. There are ensemble renditions of Adele's Chasing Pavements, of Keane's Somewhere Only We Know and Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out – all contemporaneous with Goodwin's decade of banking megalomania. And if the song Especially for You – a hit for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan in 1989 – doesn't quite fit the timeline, you delight in hearing Fred the Shred duet on it with the ghost of Adam Smith anyway. Can either Brian Cox or Goodwin actor Sandy Grierson even sing? Barely a note. In a play about hare-brained recklessness that seemed somehow the point. It's the interplay between the pioneering Enlightenment economist and his wrongheaded 21st century devotee that proves the drama's real stroke of genius. Goodwin orders a flunky to source a first edition copy of Smith's seminal work The Wealth of Nations to take pride of place in the RBS HQ and, after it arrives, so does the author in spirit form. 'Where the f*** am I?' wonders Cox, playing Smith, while Goodwin wonders whether the stress of acquisitions has brought on apparitions. On discovering he's in the future, standing in the bank where his 18th century savings are lodged, the great man inquires how they are doing. 'What's your account number?' asks Goodwin. 'Four,' comes the answer. The serious point behind their encounters, of course, is Smith's commentary on the economic vandalism perpetrated in his name by his number one fan. Oops. It turns out Goodwin has misinterpreted virtually every page of the economic bible and, bewilderingly for the author, embarked on a programme of aggressive capitalism. 'You've got me all wrong,' he says, scandalised at Goodwin's insistence that he is the father of modern capitalism. 'I'm not a capitalist. I'm a moral philosopher.' It's a devastating take-down, not just of the banker, but of the fanaticism which can grow from the selective reading of seminal texts. The moral? Pay closer attention. And Cox is superb – a cross between a bumbling great uncle transported to confusing, unfamiliar times and a raging Logan Roy (his character in TV drama succession) driven to distraction by the incompetence of his protégés. 'You f***** idiot,' he snarls at Goodwin as the banking bubble bursts, sounding exactly like his TV media mogul carpeting one of his disaster-prone offspring. Sensibly, Adam Smith sees the writing on the wall and demands to withdraw his savings. Gordon Brown delivers his verdict on the banker too. He calls him an 'utter b******.' Even the mild-mannered Alistair Darling is only marginally less withering. And, bringing the hubristic tale to grass-roots level, we hear from shareholders. One inquires of Goodwin why his salary is 50 times that of typical staff members when the industry standard is six. She reappears later to remind him that figure has risen to 120. It all climaxes, as we knew it surely would, with Goodwin as the demented captain of a vast sinking ship casting around for the billions required to forestall the certain doom which lay only hours away. We know the rest. The knighthood being wrested from him and – after a struggle – a portion of his pension too. The pariah status that followed and the mea culpa which never truly did. And the Festival Theatre audiences surely know the rest better than most. This is a play about their home town's recent history. Edinburgh is a compact city. Goodwin's 'Pleasure Dome' – the flagship branch in St Andrews Square where he did his showing off to the great and the good – is less than a mile away. Gogarburn, the mini-kingdom he had built a stone's throw from the airport, has passed into city legend: the opulence, the private jet, the ocean going self-indulgence… Most in Edinburgh are well aware, too, that Goodwin lives among them still – not too long a walk, in fact, from where we sat hooting and cringing at his outrageous excesses. 'What about due diligence?' a subordinate asks him at one point in the drama. 'F*** due diligence,' comes the uproarious response which we must assume falls on the 'fiction' side of the fence. Except, of course, it now looks broadly true. An uncomfortable week in prospect, then, for the target of this theatrical spanking. Make It Happen runs in Fred Goodwin's home city until August 9. If the 66-year-old is currently in residence then his ears must be burning. I'm fine with that. I didn't see anyone who wasn't.
The Herald Scotland
06-07-2025
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
The Scottish stage play casting Fred Goodwin in a new light
When the rise and fall of 'Fred The Shred,' the nickname Goodwin earned for his ruthless cost-cutting, is turned into one of the biggest Scottish stage shows of the year, he is expected be cast in a whole new light. Read more: The actor who will play the man who would become Britain's most notorious banking boss has suggested audiences will see a different side to Goodwin – and may even feel empathy for him. Sandy Grierson, who has spoken to a number of former RBS employees as part of his preparation for the National Theatre of Scotland play Make It Happen, said he had been keen to get past his reputation and 'find a way to like the guy.' Former RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin will be depicted in the new stage play Make It Happen. The show, by the leading British playwright James Graham, will see Brian Cox play the ghost of Adam Smith, the 18th century philosopher and 'father of modern economics," who returns to Edinburgh to haunt Goodwin at the height of the crisis crippling RBS. Grierson said the show – which will launch in Cox's home city of Dundee later this month before a run at the Edinburgh International Festival – would grapple with the question of how much blame for the collapse of RBS and the global financial crisis that unfolded in 2008 should 'sit on the shoulders' of Goodwin. Sandy Grierson will play Fred Goodwin on stage in Make It Happen. (Image: Mihaela Bodlovic) Elements of a Greek tragedy – including a chorus, which will feature reimagined pop anthems from the 2000s – will be deployed to recall the rapid expansion of RBS during Goodwin's tenure, when it acquired a string of other banks and cut costs to generate bigger profits. Grierson said Goodwin had been compared to Icarus, the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun, during the making of the show, the first major cultural project to explore RBS's involvement in the global financial crash. Brian Cox and Sandy Grierson will play Adam Smith and Fred Goodwin in the forthcoming stage play Make It Happen. (Image: National Theatre of Scotland/David Vintiner) The actor said: 'He did get the closest to the sun. He got RBS to being the biggest bank in the world. I'm fairly confident that at that time it seemed like the best thing to do. 'Fred Goodwin didn't just do it in isolation. It was a time when everyone around the world was trying to get their bank bigger and bigger so they did not get bought over. You were either a big fish that did the eating or a wee fish that got eaten. Brian Cox and Sandy Grierson will appear in Make It Happen at Dundee Rep and the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. (Image: David Vintiner) 'I think the banks had got themselves into some sort of alchemy. They were in a constant circle of growth. 'The play has a momentum right from the beginning that doesn't stop until all the wheels come off.' The rise and fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland under Fred Goodwin will be explored in the stage play Make It Happen. Graham, whose previous work has brought Margaret Thatcher, Dominic Cummings and Rupert Murdoch to the stage and screen, has suggested that Make It Happen would trace the links between the 2008 financial crisis and the modern-day economic landscape in Britain, as well as explore the working-class roots of Paisley-born Goodwin, the first member of his family to go to university. Key players in the handling of the 2008 financial crisis, including the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, will be portrayed in Make It Happen, along with a mix of real-life and fictionalised RBS figures. Director Andrew Panton and actor Brian Cox during rehearsals for new National Theatre of Scotland play Make It Happen. (Image: Alastair More) As well as speaking to former RBS employees, Grierson has studied video footage of Goodwin and even walked around the grounds of the bank's vast headquarters complex at Gogarburn, which was built during his tenure. He told The Herald: 'Edinburgh is a small place. I have met people who were involved with RBS and have stories to tell. 'There were lots of stories about 'Fred the Shred' and all of that, but I've been quite keen to get under the surface of that. 'Regardless of the point of view of the audience, I felt I needed to find a way to like the guy. There are people out there who got on with him. He has got friends that still stand by him. 'I think you've got to absolutely take your hat off to his ability. He seems to have been so calm under pressure. It is remarkable. "There is a lot of things you can say about Fred Goodwin, but I think he was victimised to an extent. He put himself in the firing line. 'It seems really weird that he took his eye off the ball so badly. I have still not quite got my head around it. 'I don't think that it's a show that asks you to entirely sympathise with Fred Goodwin. That's not what we are doing. "There is a sort of Greek tragedy vein that runs through it. When you watch a Greek tragedy, you can sort of have empathy with a character without necessarily being on their side. 'Hopefully people will understand what we imagine was fuelling and firing Fred Goodwin.' Make It Happen was developed following discussions about separate ideas for new plays from Graham, Cox and Andrew Panton, the artistic director of Dundee Rep, where the show will launch on July 18. When Make It Happen was announced in January, Cox suggested that Adam Smith had been "constantly misquoted" and had had his writing "hijacked" by politicians like Margaret Thatcher. Grierson said: 'When I first read the play, I loved the idea of the haunting of Fred Goodwin the notion of re-examining Adam Smith, prising him away from the clutches of Margaret Thatcher and investigating him in a more intelligent context than he is often seen and how we imply that Fred Goodwin probably saw him. "Coming into this, I got quite fixated on the bits of footage of Fred Goodwin that do exist. "But I'm aware that I have to perform the play that James has written and the Fred Goodwin that he has written. 'We are dealing with someone who is very tight-lipped and contained emotionally. That is allowed to escape in a pressure cooker kind of way. "When Fred meets Adam, there is certainly scope for your own imagination to let loose a bit more. 'The scenes that James has written between Adam and Fred are great. Fred needs Adam. He can't let him go - he desperately tries to cling onto him.' Make It Happen is at Dundee Rep from July 18-26 and at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh from July 30-August 9
Spectator
04-06-2025
- Business
- Spectator
In praise of Michael O'Leary
NatWest has returned to full private-sector ownership 17 years after the £46 billion bailout that took it into state hands – and five years after the name swap which reduced the once globally trumpeted Royal Bank of Scotland to a humble north-of-the-border branch network, while promoting its English subsidiary NatWest to become the parent brand. RBS shareholders who were almost wiped out but hung on to what are now NatWest certificates have seen their shares triple in value since 2023, finally surpassing the bailout price. HM Treasury took a £10.5 billion loss on the whole rescue exercise, which required a decade-long series of placements and buybacks to filter the taxpayers' 84 per cent holding back into the market as the bank's performance gradually recovered. But few would argue it was badly managed or wrong in the first place. Fred Goodwin's RBS, crippled by his hubristic bid for the Dutch group ABN Amro on top of a balance-sheet full of toxic debt, fully deserved to fail. But its customers did not deserve to lose their deposits and livelihoods, and when chancellor Alistair Darling received a call from Goodwin's chairman Sir Tom McKillop on 7 October 2008 telling him RBS would fail the next day, Darling had to set aside any consideration of moral hazard and step in: chaos would have ensued if he hadn't. The workaday NatWest – which never had a coherent strategy for the era of globalised banking that died with that phone call – has survived, despite a continuing tide of branch closures, as a relatively trusted high-street brand. I'm pleased to see chairman Rick Haythornthwaite talking about a 'simpler, safer' bank with a 'UK-focused business model'.
