Dame Alison Rose had a spring in her step as she greeted NatWest staff and shareholders in April.

Speaking at an annual gathering at the bank’s sprawling headquarters on the outskirts of Edinburgh, the chief executive had recently received one of the highest awards in the King’s first honours list.

She was also the first NatWest boss to get an annual bonus since the financial crisis.

Since winning the top job in 2019, Dame Alison had been feted not just for her banking nous but for championing corporate “values” and “purpose”, buzzwords embraced heartily by fellow blue chip executives.

“Our values are at the heart of how we deliver our purpose-led strategy,” she told the gathering.

Under her leadership, NatWest had come to describe itself as “a relationship bank for a digital world”. Its values are “being inclusive, curious, robust, sustainable and ambitious”.

They are laudable aims. Yet these same values would be Dame Alison’s undoing, as they were applied in ways she may never have imagined.

In a now widely reported dossier first revealed by The Telegraph, overzealous employees at Coutts, a private bank and subsidiary of NatWest, explained at length why they believed the group’s inclusion or “ESG” (environmental, social and governance) policies meant they should no longer provide services to Nigel Farage.