More thoughts on the banking rep meltdown.

Seven days’ later, NatWest CEO Alison Rose dramatically revealed she had been the source of the BBC article and admitted the information she provided had been incorrect. After attempting to cling on she resigned at 1.45am the following day.

PR expert Mark Borkowski said bank bosses were guilty of using ’20th-century PR to deal with 21st-century crisis issues’. He told MailOnline: ‘Every crisis that leads to problems that will bring down people is down to hubris and the advice these people are getting.

The way to deal with any crisis is to burst the bubble. The professionals advising those in charge need to be critical friends and advise an authentic, transparent approach.

‘Instead they’re using expensive lawyers, expensive PRs and expensive security consultants who are all operating in a bubble and saying the same thing.

They should have faced up quickly to the issues and dealt with them rather than trying to spin their way out of the crisis and hoping it would all go away.’

Mr Borkowski said the roots of the crisis was banks losing touch with the public and relying on ‘woke-washing’ to ‘paper over the cracks’.

He said: ‘This all comes from the fact that we have lost the traditional bank manager – the human interface with the public.

‘That pushes them so far away from reality that rather than dealing with things their customers actually want they go for all this woke washing, which is all just words.

‘The rot at these banks has not been fixed, and they’re using certain advertising messages to paper over the cracks.’