IS THIS THE ULTIMATE HUMILIATION FOR A PROUD SCOTTISH BANK?

THE Scottish National Party won’t like this one little bit: the new chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, Alison Rose, has decided to change its name to . . . NatWest. West, as in Westminster — the patch of London the SNP holds responsible for all of Scotland’s ills.

What a reversal this is: it was under Fred Goodwin that, in 2000, RBS launched a hostile takeover of the much larger NatWest, buying it for £22 billion. Goodwin — later knighted for services to Scottish banking — let it be known how inferior the management of the Londonbased bank was, and shareholders went along with it.

The success of that deal led directly to the arrogance that saw Goodwin make possibly the worst acquisition in business history, buying the hopelessly over-extended Dutch bank ABN Amro in 2007: when the credit crunch hit almost immediately afterwards, RBS had to be bailed out by British taxpayers to the tune of £45 billion. We still haven’t got our money back.

It was a shattering blow to then SNP leader Alex Salmond, a former employee of RBS, who had cheered on all of Goodwin’s increasingly megalomaniac acquisitions. Salmond referred to this as Scotland’s ‘arc of prosperity’.

As the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling devastatingly pointed out about Salmond during the Scottish independence referendum of 2014: ‘He endorsed the deal by RBS that led to disaster. The disaster that overtook the bank was made in Edinburgh, not London.’ Nowadays Salmond has more personal concerns on his mind: he is soon to face trial on an attempted rape charge (which he strenuously denies). But RBS is also in the doghouse for what can be described as a ruthlessly exploitative assault on small businesses, many of which it drove to the wall with unscrupulous lending policies.

In other words, the very name RBS has become terminally tainted. No wonder its new boss has decided to ‘rebrand’ (the customary euphemism).

In fact, the RBS name will remain on all its buildings and offices in Scotland. This hasn’t stopped a former SNP MP, Paul Monaghan, protesting that renaming the company NatWest ‘will cost the Royal Bank of Scotland thousands of customers’.

Somehow I don’t think many Scots will close their accounts in protest: they, more than anyone, already know what disgrace and dishonour had befallen the once great name of Royal Bank of Scotland — and who was to blame.