Goodwin quits Queen's charity to spare her 'embarrassment' of his stripped knighthood
FRED GOODWIN, the former banker, has resigned as a trustee of the Queen’s personal charity to avoid embarrassing the Royal family.
The man who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to the verge of collapse quit from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust days before he was stripped of his knighthood last week by the Honours Forfeiture Committee.
The disclosure of his resignation came amid reports that the Royal family was “concerned” about the cancellation of the knighthood. There has been growing sentiment in the City and among business leaders that the decision was arbitrary and suggested that Britain was “anti-business”.
Mr Goodwin had been one of the six trustees of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust, which distributes money to good causes, since 2004. At the time of his appointment, he was already closely linked with the Prince of Wales through the Prince’s Trust, of which he was chairman.
One of his associates said he had stepped down as pressure to remove his knighthood mounted before last week’s decision, adding: “He did not want to cause the Royal family any embarrassment.” The Queen is understood to have voiced misgivings privately before she signed the order annulling Mr Goodwin’s honour last week.
She was presented with “advice”, which she has no choice but to act on, from the Honours Forfeiture Committee, that she should annul Mr Goodwin’s knighthood.
The supposedly independent committee usually looks at people who have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of three months or more, or have been censured or struck off by the relevant professional or other regulatory authority.
Mr Goodwin has not been convicted of any offence, nor censured professionally. The committee resisted calls to annul his honour in 2009.
The Queen’s reservations about the decision are said to be shared by other members of the Royal family, including the Princess Royal and the Duke of York.
“The Queen is concerned about the precedent that it sets,” claimed a confidant of the monarch.
Mr Goodwin was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s
Birthday Honours List in 2004 for services to banking.
“Are we now going to have incoming ministers stripping their predecessors of their roles as Privy Counsellors if they want to make scapegoats of them? The Queen is very much aware that this decision opens a new can of worms,” added the confidant.
As recently as last October, the Queen was reported to be adamant that Mr Goodwin should remain as a trustee of the Jubilee Trust. “The Queen saw no reason why a man who had given long service to royal charities should not continue to do so,” the Queen’s biographer Robert Hardman wrote in Our Queen, published last year. When Mr Goodwin left RBS after its effective nationalisation in 2008, Prince Charles hosted a luncheon in his honour. The Princess Royal’s son, Peter Phillips, was given a job at RBS and her daughter, Zara Phillips, is sponsored by the bank.