For more than a decade Sir Philip Green has been king of the high street, strutting down Oxford Street, medallion swinging like Tony Manero at the end of Saturday Night Fever.
With his slicked-back curls and year-round tan, Green’s almost cartoonish persona is writ large over the multibillion-pound retail empire he commands. He shot to prominence in 2004 when he tried to wrest control of the national treasure that is Marks & Spencer, his pugnacious business style injecting rock’n’roll and supermodels into the staid world of suits and share prices.
Green lost that battle but got rich anyway, and in the 00s could do no wrong. He was lauded by the business community as his family banked monster pay cheques, including £1.2bn from Topshop owner Arcadia in 2005, which stands as the biggest payout in British corporate history.
As his profile and bank balance swelled, he became a regular of the gossip pages, papped with a jet set that included Kate Moss and Simon Cowell. Finally, he won the ultimate establishment accolade when Tony Blair’s government granted him a knighthood for services to retail.
But the events of recent days have brought a rapid rewrite of the Green story. All that he has achieved is now being called into question as, rather than digest pictures of him in swimming shorts on one of his yachts, the public is being asked to stomach BHS workers having their pension benefits cut. The government-sponsored Pension Protection Fund is preparing to rescue the collapsed retailer’s pension fund, which has a £571m hole.
Green bought BHS in 2000 for £200m and followed it up two years later with the purchase of Arcadia for £800m. In 2004, Green’s wife Tina became the legal owner of both companies. Because Tina is a Monaco resident, no UK income tax was due on the £1.2bn payout. BHS tumbled into administration on Monday, putting 11,000 jobs at risk, and the tycoon faces serious questions about his role in the 88-year-old company’s downfall. He is to be summoned before the work and pensions select committee. His famous short temper may be triggered.
He offloaded BHS to a little-known investor for £1 last year, but is being held partly responsible for its subsequent collapse as his family and other shareholders banked £586m in dividends, rental payments and interest on loans during their 15-year ownership. Some politicians are calling for Green to be stripped of his knighthood, an indignity that would put him in the company of disgraced bank chief Fred Goodwin, who oversaw the implosion of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
With spectacularly bad timing, Green, whose family is worth £3.2bn, is currently awaiting delivery of his latest toy: a $150m (£100m) superyacht named Lionheart. The 90-metre vessel will join Green’s speedboat, helicopter, two other yachts and Gulfstream jet, which comes in handy for his weekly trips to and from Monaco.
Stewart Lansley, author of Top Man: How Philip Green Built His High Street Empire, says receiving a knighthood was very important to the entrepreneur and he would be stung by its loss. “Green craves respectability and loved getting into Who’s Who in 2005,” he says. “He loves the limelight and is in his element appearing in gossip columns, taking centre stage at a business event or jumping into helicopters followed by cameras.”
Green went to the now-defunct private Carmel College, known as “the Jewish Eton”, but left at 16 with no O-levels. His father, a small businessman, died when he was 12, and Green started working with his entrepreneurial mother, Alma, who owned a portfolio of garages and car showrooms.
“Green always likes to present himself as an outsider who has brushed with the establishment and broken business taboos – who has succeeded despite his lack of favour at the top,” adds Lansley. Indeed, Green was proud when he was able to reel off business luminaries such as Allan Leighton, Lord Grabiner and high-profile banker Robin Saunders as members of his boards.
Green earned his knighthood from a Labour party that was desperate to court senior business figures, as it sought to shrug off the perception it was hostile to those Margaret Thatcher called “wealth creators”. Peter Mandelson once said he was “intensely relaxed” about people becoming fabulously rich – so long as they paid their taxes. It is hard to imagine Jeremy Corbyn uttering similar sentiments.
Roger Mullin, the SNP MP who won Gordon Brown’s old seat of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath at the 2015 general election, and who spoke out against Green in the House of Commons on Monday, said: “Governments sometimes get fascinated by mere wealth. The difficulty with that is that once someone who has been lauded in that way gets into difficulty, there’s a tendency for the establishment not to be overly forensic.”
Attitudes towards business and the 1% have changed radically since the financial crash plunged Britain into the deepest recession in a generation. Today’s Labour party under Corbyn is noticeably less sympathetic, an attitude symbolised most recently by the decision to turn down sponsorship from fast-food giant McDonald’s for the party’s September conference.
Indeed, by the time the coalition drafted in Green to lead a government efficiency drive in 2010, there was already less tolerance for his brash brand of capitalism; his stores were targeted by the protest group UK Uncut in the wake of his appointment.
At the time, Green raged that the tax issue was not relevant to a discussion about his suitability to lead a review of government spending. “I am not being judged on anything other than am I a sensible appointment to help make sure that the money is spent in the right way. I contribute tens of millions of pounds [to the exchequer]. I employ 45,000 people and pay tens and tens of millions of pounds of tax. This is just outrageous.”
In the same way Manchester United players were exposed to Sir Alex Ferguson’s famous dressing-downs in the dressing room, receiving the hairdryer treatment from Green is part of a business journalist’s lot. He doesn’t like criticism, although he does not object to column inches documenting his success and the lifestyle it pays for.
Lansley says the size of his dividends are in part about self-promotion, but also because he wanted to join the billionaire class and enjoy its lifestyle – the private jet, the super-yacht, the charity donations. “He craved the trappings of the tycoon and the lifestyle that must go with it,” Lansley explains. “The dividends were necessary to pay for this.”
One journalist recounts a phone conversation, around the time of Green’s appointment as efficiency tsar, when an expletive-laden rant was interrupted by a constantly dropping signal as his yacht bobbed on the Mediterranean. In the background, music and glasses tinkled, and it was possible to imagine Cowell having suntan lotion applied on a nearby lounger.
Green can be charming and awful in the same breath, but he is a force to be reckoned with, adding colour to the grey world of suits. While some bosses hide behind the management-speak of “idea showers” and “strategic staircases”, Green is more prosaic. On whether he is responsible for the demise of BHS, he recently told one interviewer: “If I give you my plane, right, and you tell me you’re a great driver and you crash it into the first fucking mountain, is that my fault?”
Neil Saunders, retail analyst at Conlumino, says that, nonetheless, Green will be perceived as being on the hook for what happened at BHS: “I think people see it as being unfair that he profited from a business that ultimately turned out to be unstable.”
Saunders points out that BHS it may well have gone bust sooner if Green hadn’t taken over. “In the latter years, I think BHS became something of a problem child for Sir Philip and he focused on the core Arcadia brands [such as Topshop], which he knew would be more successful. It is unlikely that anyone could have saved BHS without a lot of pain and difficulty. That said, entrepreneurs are only admired if they are seen to ‘do right’ by the businesses and people they employ.”
After researching his book, Lansley says he had mixed feelings about Green. “There was admiration for his tenacity, formidable business skills, determination, drive and energy, but his business methods are always going to be seen as controversial. He is not a successful founding entrepreneur in the traditional sense – setting up and building long-lasting companies from scratch like Jack Cohen at Tesco – but, in essence, a business predator.”
Lansley views Green as “king of the retail takeover”. “He has not built market share but bought into it ... amassing wealth through deal-making, financial engineering, improving processes, cost-cutting and squeezing suppliers.”
Green used BHS as his stepping stone to the big time. It gave him the means to take over Arcadia and to make two hostile bids for M&S. But, Lansley argues, BHS suffered under his control. “He initially turned it around not by improving its image, changing stock, dragging into modernity, but by cutting costs, squeezing suppliers and changing systems,” he says. “This gave an initial boost to profits, but without strengthening the underlying business, it was always heading for failure.”
Over the years, Green has locked horns with Stuart (now Lord) Rose, who was the M&S chief executive when Green launched his second unsuccessful takeover attempt in 2004. There is a famous story in business circles of Green accosting Lord Rose on the pavement outside M&S’s head office and grabbing him by the lapels. Rose had turned down an earlier offer to work for the entrepreneur before agreeing to lead M&S’s defence.
“He wasn’t above ringing me up during the height of the bid and singing ‘If I were a rich man’ down the telephone to me, trying to point out the error of my ways [for not selling] ... that I would make more money,” Lord Rose told one interviewer. “What I like about him is that Philip will punch you if he thinks he’s got a reason to punch you, but if you punch him back he’s quite able to take the punch.”
The collapse of BHS has had a dramatic effect on the public’s perception of Green. They may not have shopped in BHS for the last decade, but they care about the loss of 11,000 jobs, desolate high-street parades and pensioners being shortchanged. There is a spectrum of opinion as to how culpable Green is.
Green’s name is often used in the same breath as the phrase “Midas touch”, but some argue his strength lies in financial engineering rather than brand-building. Indeed, many in the fashion industry credit Topshop’s success to Jane Shepherdson, who now runs Whistles. Green is less keen to discuss the performance of other Arcadia brands, such as Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and Miss Selfridge, which under his stewardship have not enjoyed anything like the same level of global success. Meanwhile, retailing has morphed from a high-street industry based on gut feelings about what will sell to an increasingly online model, run by entrepreneurs with computers.
Few of the people Green has done business with will openly criticise him, but Rose told the Financial Times last year: “He’s more of a yesterday’s man than he is a tomorrow’s man. He’s a classic bricks-and-mortar retailer. Time has caught him up.”
‘A chatty, everyman persona masks a ruthless operator’
Jess Cartner-Morley
In the past decade at London fashion week, many looks have come and gone, but one sight has remained unchanged: Sir Philip Green manspreading on the front row, Monaco-tanned in an open-necked shirt. As the boss of Topshop and a longterm sponsor of London fashion week, Green is the unofficial godfather of British fashion.
Green’s relationship with the industry is a classic love-hate paradox. There is no doubt that the revival of British fashion owes a great deal to Green. The success of Topshop has put the British high street at the centre of global fashion, while Green’s bankrolling of catwalk shows by talent-rich, cash-poor designers has kept its creativity in the spotlight. But despite his place at the industry top table, Green will never truly fit in, because his passion is for the bottom line, not for style. What’s more, his brash, streetwise persona is at odds with the British fashion establishment’s tendency to worship an upper-class bohemian, couture-wearing eccentric aesthetic tradition. And Green makes no attempt to tone down his barrow-boy shtick, even in the company of Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Alex Shulman, both of whom have distinctly Radio 4 accents. If anything, he seems to ham it up.
The seating plan at one of Green’s Topshop Unique shows is telling. Where many other fashion industry bosses prefer to operate from the backroom – I doubt I could pick out either of the Chanel-owning Wertheimer brothers in a lineup, so low is their profile – Green likes to flaunt his status. He will typically choose to be seated between a woman of industry gravitas – Wintour, Shulman or London fashion week bosses Natalie Massenet or Caroline Rush – and, on the other side, either Kate Moss, Cara Delevingne or another tabloid-worthy model. For all his plain-speaking, anti-diplomatic bravado, he has a canny understanding of how to play the fashion power game.
Green has an affinity with the Croydon-born Moss that he would never feel with – for example – the aristo-models who were the style icons of the preceding era. His alliance with Moss, a regular guest on his yacht, has been a powerful influence on fashion in the last decade, with their Topshop collaborations helping to keep her at the forefront of British fashion.
There is something of the Boris Johnson about Green, minus the grandiose vocabulary: a chatty, everyman persona masks a ruthless operator. Green has kept London fashion week awash in champagne and mini fish’n’chips for a decade, remaking it in his own brash, flash image. Topshop-sponsored shows are notable for their lavish catering. The symbolism of the entire industry eating a free lunch, paid for by Green, is lost on no one. Like anyone in the industry who has had the temerity to criticise Topshop, I have had full and frank exchanges of views with him. His way of doing business is intensely personal: he takes any critique of Topshop as a personal insult, and responds in kind.
