CITY AND SUBURBAN
NatWest runs short of a chairman, so there goes Sir David's peace and quiet
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Ihave learned not to think of academic life as peaceful but perhaps Sir David Row- land did. He was certainly ready for some peace and quiet after his five years at the helm of Lloyd's of London, and he found an agreeable retirement job as president of an Oxford college. Now he will double it up with the chair of the National Westminster Bank, so there goes his peace and quiet. He represents NatWest's latest solution to the recurrent problem of finding a chairman, something which (as I was saying a few weeks ago) always seems to come as a terri- ble shock to the board. It was startled into appointing Lord Boardman and it made a muddle of appointing his successor, so that Lord Alexander had to be dropped in, as though on a parachute. You might have thought that, nine years later, the board would see him going, but it didn't. He will be off in the spring, and that is too soon for Lord Blyth, who had been lined up for the succession, to take over. He will still be at Boots the Chemists, arranging his shops in the form of initiative tests and defying me to find the Alka-Seltzer. I was not looking forward to a NatWest run on these lines, with accounts tucked away under wealth- care, so Sir David's appointment comes as a relief to me. How it comes to him is anoth- er question. He takes over after NatWest has abandoned its ill-starred attempt to build one of the world's top ten investment banks, and has fallen back on its strengths in commercial banking. For all banks, though, as their tumbling share prices tell us, the good days are over.
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