Cash and dishonours: an inglorious history of celebrity bank Coutts

Despite the eye-popping perks and glittering roster of clients from Charles Dickens to Emma Watson, the history of Coutts is not as it seeks to portray, writes Guy Walters. The Farage furore is simply the latest in a line of scandals stretching back centuries

‘Particular people have always banked at Coutts’, including Emma Watson, Stormzy and Charles Dickens (Getty)

Back in 1970, Coutts ran one of those insufferably smug advertising campaigns in broadsheet newspapers that would not sit well in these supposedly more egalitarian times. Featuring William Pitt the Younger, Edmund Burke, George Canning and Charles James Fox, the advert was headlined, “Particular people have always banked at Coutts”, and then went on to ask, “Aren’t you particular, too?”

It’s that sense of clublike oh-so-exclusive specialness that Coutts has always tried to foster throughout its 331-year history, despite the fact that it is, after all, merely a place to deposit or borrow money. That same smugness still permeates its promotional efforts, with the bank’s website liberally peppered with ghastly claims of “supporting the world’s most exceptional people”, and “banking the best and brightest for over three hundred years”.

A 1970 advertising campaign in a broadsheet newspaper (Coutts)