guardian.co.uk,
Juliette Garside, Monday 2 April 2012
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| Angela Knight said the BBA was 'strong and forward-looking' Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian |
Angela
Knight, the voice of banking during five of the most tumultuous years in the
industry's history, is to step down this summer.
Knight, who
is 61, said she had "one more job in me" as she announced her
departure from the British Bankers' Association. She described her time there
as one of "extraordinary difficulty" that came "during a crisis
of a magnitude that few if any have seen before or expected".
A former
Conservative MP and economic secretary to Ken Clarke, she joined the BBA on 1
April 2007 and was soon pitched into battle on behalf of the businesses blamed
for the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Her first
trial by fire came on Friday, 14 September 2007, the day the queues formed
outside Northern Rock in the first run on a British bank since the 19th
century, when Knight took on 19 back-to-back television and radio interviews
from a studio at London's Millbank Tower.
As the credit
crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers followed, Knight become an early
morning fixture of Radio 4's Today Programme. During her tenure at the BBA, she
has given over 800 broadcast interviews, made over 1,000 speeches, and
travelled over 14,000km to and from Brussels alone.
"It's
been a lot of ground covered in both distance and issues," she said on
Monday. At a time when "banker bashing" became a national sport,
Knight's challenge was to defend the industry while avoiding becoming as
unpopular as those she represented. She played a key role in shaping the
legislation introduced to reform British banks and prevent a similar financial
collapse.
On Monday,
she paid tribute to her team at the BBA, describing the organisation as
"strong and forward looking", and to the commuters who became her
sounding board during her morning train ride from Ascot to Waterloo. "I'm
kept in order by those who I travel on the train with in the morning. There's
plenty of time for people to give me a view."
Knight drew
personal criticism for taking on the retail banks' fight against rulings that
they should compensate customers for over £5bn of mis-sold payment protection
insurance. The BBA backed away from seeking a judicial review after Lloyds
Banking Group and Barclays withdrew their support.
"We
had to take it on behalf of the banks and that is very hard for a trade
association on a very unpopular issue," said Knight. "It became very
personalised. But you can't just walk away."
A chemistry
graduate who started her career working for Air Products, an American
industrial gas company, she set up on her own, forming Knight & Cook, a
metallurgical processor, before entering local politics in Sheffield as a Tory
councillor. She entered parliament in 1992 before serving as economic secretary
to the Treasury between 1995 and 1997.
She lost
her seat in the 1997 general election that swept Tony Blair to power, and
joined the Association of Private Client Investment Manager and Stockbrokers,
where she was instrumental in breaking up a 2000 merger plan between the London
and Frankfurt stock exchanges. At the time, she described herself as "a
woman with two kids doing a job".
BBA
chairman Marcus Agius praised her "extraordinary leadership and
energy" and said she had been instrumental in making the BBA "the key
voice in the debate on the future of the banking sector".
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