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Moves begin to strip Fred Goodwin of his knighthood
Scores of MPs have written to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell demanding an inquiry into the disgraced RBS banker’s honour
Nearly 70 MPs have signed a letter calling for the disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin to be stripped of his knighthood. They want the Forfeiture Committee, which over recent years has stripped 28 people of their honours, including boxer Prince Naseem and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, to examine the case for removing Goodwin's honour, awarded in 2004 for services to banking.
The Daily Mail reports that the letter went to Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, who chairs the committee, last night.
The rules state that recipients can be stripped of their honours if the "retention of the appointment or award would bring the honours system into disrepute". Mugabe had his knighthood removed after a long public outcry over his continued tyranny in Zimbabwe. Prince Naseem lost his MBE after being jailed for dangerous driving.
In Goodwin's case it is not just that he took the Royal Bank of Scotland to the brink of bankruptcy before resigning last October and leaving the state to rescue the bank, but that he is now refusing to give up his controversial £700,000-a-year pension.
"His role in the collapse of RBS and his refusal to countenance any reduction in his grotesquely extravagant pension convinces me it would be wholly inappropriate for him to retain the knighthood," said Labour MP Gordon Prentice.
But a Daily Mail source in Whitehall put a dampener on the MP's hopes, saying: "He's not Mugabe. It took years to strip Mugabe's knighthood. This is not the same." ·
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if he were any kind of a man he would give it up along with the pension, he is loathsome
Of course Fred Goodwin should be stripped of his knighthood. His behaviour has been appalling and he has refused to play fair with the taxpayers who bailed him out of his mess. The stripping process should also be expedited
Stripping him of his knighthood, is good and makes a public declaration. But equally, the DTi (or whatever our spin-obsessed government deigns to call it now) has the power to prevent him being a company director...why has that not been done?