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Paul Moore
Conscientious banker who blew the whistle against his former bosses at HBOS in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash
Paul Moore was told he did not fit in
Paul Moore, a Roman Catholic with a
booming voice, was agonising over
whether to blow the whistle on his
former employer when he heard Joyce
Meyer, an American evangelist, say on
his car radio: “You will not defeat Goli-
ath with your mouth shut.”
Moore flared into public attention in
February 2009 when he sent the House
of Commons Treasury select commit-
tee a 5,000-word, nine-page account of
the circumstances leading to his firing
from the financial group HBOS, for-
merly Halifax Bank of Scotland.
When he read that Lord Stevenson of
Coddenham and Andy Hornby,
respectively the former HBOS chair-
man and chief executive, were to
appear before the select committee to
explain their role in the 2008 financial
crisis, he wanted to pre-empt their
denials of responsibility.
Moore thought he might be breaking
a non-disclosure agreement he had
signed in return for a £500,000 payoff.
The committee clerk, however, pointed
out that his submission would be pro-
tected by parliamentary privilege.
He claimed he had been removed in
2004 because of his repeated allega-
tions that the company’s aggressive
sales culture was putting customers in
financial danger.
This was not what Hornby’s prede-
cessor, the ambitious Sir James Crosby,
wanted to hear. Before the select com-
mittee had a chance to discuss Moore’s
report, Crosby resigned as deputy
chairman of the Financial Services
Authority, then the industry’s main
regulator.
In 2013 he surrendered his knight-
hood and nearly a third of his pension
after Moore’s analysis was supported by
imposed higher standards of conduct.
“I believe the world needed the finan-
cial crisis to bring it to its senses,
because it was gripped by a kind of
blindness,” he said. “What we need now
is capitalism with a conscience.”
Paul Russell Moore was born in Bris-
tol in 1958, the second of four children
of Bernard, a ceramics engineer, and
Jean, who worked in the blood transfu-
sion service. The family followed Ber-
nard’s career from Stoke to Paris and
Brussels. He worked at the Aldermas-
ton weapons research base in Berk-
shire, helping to build the hydrogen
bomb. “Like me, he wasn’t much good at
getting on with his bosses,” said Paul.
Bernard, a volatile, church-going al-
coholic, went to consult on China’s lav-
atory industry, saying: “There’s nothing
that gives me greater excitement than
the idea of a billion bottoms looking for
a receptacle.”
Paul was educated at Gilling Castle
prep school and Ampleforth College in
North Yorkshire, then read law at Bris-
tol University. At Gilling Castle, he said,
“I used to lie in my dormitory bed, send-
ing imaginary kisses through the air-
waves to Mum. I got over it by building
a force field around my feelings. Just as
many young boarders do.” He excelled
there at cross-country running, rugby
and cricket, as wicket-keeper and
opening bat.
Moore, a slim 5ft 9in, fell in love with
skiing on an Ampleforth school trip to
Switzerland, and discovered his best
subjects were English and classics. He
became head of house, and was a con-
temporary of the broadcaster Ed Stour-
ton and the actor Rupert Everett.
He started work for a market re-
search company, Documentary Re-search, before training as a barrister.
After a spell in chambers, he moved to
Allied Hambro (later Allied Dunbar) in
Swindon to be nearer to the Welsh
mountains he could see from his
window, to indulge his new obsession
with hang-gliding.
The legal department there was re-
sponsible for compliance with regula-
tion. Moore helped to design Allied
Dunbar’s response to the groundbreak-
ing 1986 Financial Services Act. “From
the early days, I became a customer
champion,” he said.
The company was the UK’s top mort-
gage provider so it could sell the accom-
panying insurance policies. Moore
moved to the Kleinwort Benson bank,
which financed those mortgages.
On a hang-gliding holiday to Chile in
December 1988, Moore met Maureen
Oats Villaquiran on top of a mountain.In the car to dinner that night, he
played She Drives Me Crazy by Fine
Young Cannibals. Maureen, an occupa-
tional therapist, said that was her fa-
vourite track and Paul proposed.
They had three children: Emily, who
works in maternity services, Daniel,
product manager for a technology firm,
and Oliver, a teacher. They and Mau-
reen survive Moore.
In 1995 he joined KPMG, but soon
ran into problems telling their clients
home truths. He was highly rated, but
given a below-par profit share. His boss
explained that this was because of “the
Paul Moore factor”: he did not fit in.
An old friend from Allied Dunbar be-
came an HBOS director in 2002 and re-
cruited Moore as head of risk in the in-
surance and investment management
department. When he was promoted to
group head of risk his warnings clashed
with Crosby’s sales drive.
In 2015 he was diagnosed as bipolar
and, with Mike Haworth and Guy
Mankowski, self-published a bio-
graphy, Crash, Bank, Wallop, with a de-
tailed account of his HBOS battle.
Moore became an influential figure at
Whistleblower UK, an organisation
with all-party parliamentary backing
that helps those who take on big organi-
sations, including their own employers.
In his latter years, he enjoyed cycling
over the Yorkshire moors, puffing on a
pipe at the top as he admired the view.
Moore reflected that “mankind has
got into a right old muddle and we need
to do something about it”.Paul Moore, banker, barrister and
whistleblower, was born on October 30,- He died of colitis on September 28,
2020, aged 61
tive care. The team set about revolu-
tionising the approach to the dying
and the bereaved, with Baines quickly
acknowledging that most patients
wanted to spend their last weeks at
home. Before long she was organising
palliative care in the community,
selecting and training a team compris-
ing a doctor and nurse to workalongside the local GP so that patients
could die without distress, in their own
beds.
Baines was born in Wallington in
Surrey in 1932 to John Silver, a teacher,
and Marjorie (née Tripe), a stay-at-
home mother. She was evacuated dur-
ing the Second World War to Wadhurst
in East Sussex, but returned to Surreythe Parliamentary Commission on
Banking Standards.
“I was only human,” said Moore, “so
my first reaction to Sir James’s resigna-
tion was glee, but that quickly gave way
to a deep sense of sadness and compas-
sion. The pity is that, having done the
formal thing of resigning, he couldn’t
have just admitted what he had done
and said sorry.”
Hornby went into the gambling in-
dustry then became chief executive of
the Restaurant Group, owner of Frank-
ie & Benny’s, Garfunkel’s and Wagama-
ma. Lord Stevenson has largely with-
drawn from public life. The former
HBOS chairman described Moore as
“quite brilliant — but wrongheaded”.Moore went through severe depres-
sion and apart from a brief stint with the
insurance giant Marsh, he was never
again employed by large, established
companies, despite having been a part-
ner of the “big four” accountant
KPMG. “I was branded a troublemaker
and made to feel like toxic waste for
speaking out,” he said. “I was up against
the establishment, just one person
against all of them. Do you know how
that feels? If I were to have stopped and
thought about what I was doing, I
would have been terrified.”
Nevertheless, Moore contributed to
significant reforms. Bank management
bonuses were curbed, the regulatory
system was tightened and the Financial
Services (Banking Reform) Act‘If I had stopped to think
about what I was doing I
would have been terrified’
Mary Baines
Empathetic and analytical palliative care physician who, with Dame Cicely Saunders, helped to set up the first hospice in the UK
“I have to say that I thought it very odd,
this idea of caring for the dying,” said Dr
Mary Baines of the proposal by Dame
Cicely Saunders in the late 1960s that
she join her in her newly founded
hospice in southeast London. “It was a
new speciality, you see, no one had
done it before. Doctors had no interest
in people who were dying; they were
only interested in who could be cured.”
Baines had met Saunders in the
Christian union of St Thomas’ Hospital
in London when they were both doing
their clinical training. Saunders had re-
turned to train as a doctor after nursing
a young Jewish refugee from the War-
saw ghettos. As he lay dying in pain,
and fearing that his life had been
“worthless”, he left £500 in his will to
Saunders so that she could build a hos-
pice. He asked only that he be memori-
alised in a window.
It was a petition that Saunders soon
acted upon. In 1967 she founded St
Christopher’s Hospice, the first of its
kind in the world. Assembling a strong
team, she recalled the qualities of her
former fellow medical student — Bain-
es’s empathy with patients and her
fiercely analytical brain — and asked
the part-time GP to join her.
Baines turned her down at first. “I
had worked in general practice for ten
years and enjoyed it; it was a safe job
with a future,” she said. Then she relent-
ed, and forged a new career path in
what would become known as pallia-
when she was 13 to start at Croydon
High School. Showing a propensity for
the sciences, she was accepted by
Newnham College, Cambridge, and
was one of the few women studying
natural sciences at the university in the
early 1950s. She graduated with a first.
In Wallington she had met Ted Bain-
es who, if not quite the boy next door, at
least lived on the same street. After
Durham University and his ordination
as an Anglican clergyman the couple
married in 1958. He died in 2017. She is
survived by their
children, Tim, Ra-
chel and Stephen,
whom she raised
while working
part-time in the
GP practice in Up-
per Norwood,
southeast London.
One day she
heard an appeal
by Saunders on
the radio for a
hospice and sent
in a cheque for £3.
It would lead to a
rekindling of
their friendship, and
Saunders noted that Baines worked not
far from the hospice she was trying to
set up in Sydenham.
Baines often recalled the A4 piece of
paper headed “Symptom Control” that
was handed to her by Saunders when
she started at St Christopher’s. Through
her research and writing about end-of-
life pain the A4 sheet grew into the Ox-
ford Textbook of Palliative Medicine.
The hospice’s approach to total pain
control extended to finding psychologi-
cal, spiritual and social support —hospices today often offer a gin and
tonic, and visitors, sometimes even
pets, have access 24 hours a day — as
well as alleviating physical suffering. In
that area Baines was among the first to
recognise that a solution was to admin-
ister drugs such as morphine in small,
regular doses before the pain hit. In
1983 she co-wrote Living with Dying:
The Management of Terminal Disease
with Saunders.
To mitigate the intensity of her work-
ing week Baines tended to her fruit and
vegetable garden.
In her journey in-
to palliative care she
embraced the gen-
eral hospitals and
encouraged the first
palliative care hospi-
tal team at St
Thomas’. Today
nearly every hospital
in Britain has a palli-
ative care team, and
nearly every town
has a hospice. Baines
was appointed OBE
in 1991 and retired in
the late 1990s.
“Cicely gave us two
aims,” she said. “To look after the
people on the wards and at home, but
also to change the world’s view of
dying.”Mary Baines, OBE, palliative care
physician, was born on October 29, 1932.
She died in St Christopher’s Hospice
of complications from Parkinson’s
disease on August 21, 2020, aged 87Mary Baines with a patient and, right, Cicely Saunders, with whom she studied
and
t e e e p t T n i a n h w i t
h id
She was one of the first
to suggest using regular,
small doses of pain relief