NatWest was forced to spend £24m on the former Conservative government’s aborted “Tell Sid”-style campaign featuring Sir Trevor McDonald, which would have resulted in a chunk of the bank’s state-owned shares being sold to the general public in a highly anticipated privatisation drive.
The price tag emerged when the bank released its second-quarter results and announced it was snapping up a number of mortgages from the smaller rival Metro Bank for £2.4bn.
Agreements with the government dating back to the bank’s bailout in 2008 meant NatWest was on the hook for costs linked to the campaign, including advertising, printing and distributing documents, as well as legal fees and expenses.
The Tory government had already hired a fleet of advisers, including from Goldman Sachs, Barclays, the advertising house M&C Saatchi, the law firm Freshfields and the retail share sale experts Solid Solutions, to prepare the programme.
The process, which the former chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced during last year’s autumn statement, was due to launch this summer, with a big public “Tell Sid” campaign – a reference to the slogan used to encourage the public to buy shares in the newly privatised British Gas in 1986.