by Arriving in court shuffling behind a wheeled walking frame, with a full white beard and wearing a scarlet scarf, Paul Flowers at times more than resembled Richard Attenborough as Kriss Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. But the life of the former Co-op Bank chairman is an object lesson that appearances can be deceiving.
Flowers – a one-time Methodist minister – will be sentenced on Monday after pleading guilty to converting a female friend and spending money on wine, theater tickets and luxury holidays. Earlier this year, Flowers pleaded guilty to 18 counts of abusing her position as Margaret Jarvis’s power of attorney and after her death, acting as executor of her will.
Manchester Crown Court heard the fraud was more than £180,000, but Flowers entered a plea in which he admitted just under £100,000 of fraudulent activity. Prosecutors accepted this and the crimes were described as a “gross breach of trust”. Before sentencing, the defendant’s lawyer claimed their client was in poor health. The case was delayed last year after Flowers suffered a stroke.
The sentence may be a fresh nadir for Flowers, but the downward trajectory began at least 10 years ago, and arguably well before that. There can be few more rapid falls from grace in British public life.
Born and raised in Portsmouth, Flowers worked as a teller at NatWest bank for four years before training for the ministry. He studied theology at the University of Bristol in the 1970s. He later claimed that he was raped by a fellow student during this time, which led to repressed trauma and lifelong difficulty maintaining romantic relationships.
By all accounts he was a good and well-liked Methodist minister for more than 40 years, and at one time led one of the fastest growing churches in Bradford. He was known for being friendly, welcoming to asylum seekers and earned a lot of respect by overcoming serious homophobia as an openly gay man.
Drawn to politics from an early age, he was a Labor councilor in both Rochdale and Bradford. He was chosen by the Labor party as a candidate to become member of parliament for Meriden, Warwickshire in 1985, but resigned when concerns were raised about his past.
At the time, Flowers blamed a “whispering campaign” about his sexuality, which he did not want to hide. He was also convicted of gross indecency in 1981, which he described as “the type of offense that gay people are at risk of in a repressed and intolerant society”.
In 1990, Flowers was convicted of drunk driving. The incident resulted in a church disciplinary hearing, but he was allowed to continue in his ministry. In 2004, he resigned from Lifeline, a Manchester-based drug charity of which he had been chairman for 16 years, after being accused (but later cleared) of claiming false expenses.
His failure to become leader of the Labor group on Bradford council in 2005 was said to have left him embittered. He then channeled his political ambitions into the Co-operative movement, which he joined as a teenager. He was appointed to the board of the Co-operative group in 2008 and then chairman of the Co-operative Bank in 2010.
The high street lender had just merged with Britannia Building Society and was looking to buy hundreds of branches of Lloyds Bank. He was also struggling with his IT system. That same year, then leader Ed Miliband appointed Flowers to the Labor Party’s finance and industry advisory board.
Things started to get worse for the Co-operative Bank when regulators tightened capital adequacy rules after the financial crisis. Flowers approved a recapitalization plan but Euan Sutherland, the recently arrived chief executive of the Co-operative Group, noted this.
Flowers was eventually forced out when a black hole was discovered in the bank’s finances, prompting a £1.5 billion emergency bailout from two US hedge funds in June 2013. It later emerged that Flowers was leaving the group’s board also because of alleged irregularities with its expenses. .
The Conservative government of the day tackled the scandal because of Flowers’ close association with some Labor figures and the importance of the Co-operative movement in shaping the Labor Party’s approach to business and the economy. In a disastrous Treasury Select Committee appearance after the bank rescue, Flowers repeatedly struggled to gain the understanding of important people. At one point, he told MPs that the bank had assets of £3 billion; the actual figure was closer to £47 billion.
The incident raised serious questions about how someone with so little financial experience could be appointed to such a senior role within a bank. The financial watchdog’s decision to rubber-stamp his appointment has been hailed as a prime example of the kind of light-touch regulation that characterized the years leading up to the financial crisis.
Just a day after the MPs were grilled, Flowers was filmed counting out £300 in cash to pay for cocaine and crystal meth, leading newspapers to dub him the “Crystal Methodist”. The Financial Times he described him as “that latter-day Falstaff who prefers young men to cry and crystalize to wine”.
The following year, in May 2014, Flowers was fined £525 after pleading guilty to possession of cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine at Leeds Magistrates’ Court. Flowers cited the stress of his role as Co-op and caring for his terminally ill mother as relief. Soon after, he was again caught on video snorting cocaine and entertaining rent boys at this house in Salford, Greater Manchester. He was sacked as a Methodist minister later that year and joined the BBC News Night interview: “I have sinned.”
It was at this point that Bradford City Council revealed that in 2011 “content inappropriate but not illegal for adults was found on the council’s computer brought in for servicing by Councilor Flowers”. his hard drive, he gave up immediately. .
In March 2016, the Sunday Mirror Pictures taken by another male prostitute ran of Flowers half-naked, asleep and with crisps balanced on her nipples. After that incident Flowers set up an interview with the Guardian to put his side of the story across. In it, he tried to justify his faith and his use of escorts by pointing out that Jesus was friends with Mary Magdalene and other female prostitutes.
He also claimed that he often gave “advice” to the rent boys he hired. In the same interview, Flowers admitted that he “very often” took drugs and had sex with male prostitutes in Manchester’s Renaissance hotel while he was chairman of the Co-op Bank, which was headquartered in Manchester.
In March 2018, some five years after the bank was rescued, Flowers was banned from the financial services industry by the Financial Conduct Authority for using his work email to send sexually explicit messages and to discuss illegal drugs and for use his mobile work. to call premium chat lines.
Announcing the ban, Mark Steward, the financial watchdog’s head of enforcement and market oversight, said: “The role of the Chair holds a unique place of trust and influence. The Chairman is key in setting expectations for company culture, values and behaviour. Mr. Flowers failed in his duty to lead by example and meet the high standards of integrity and honesty that the role demanded.”
As examples of official understatement go, it’s going to take some beating.
