Newspaper reactions to the Sports Direct saga and the BHS drama have made for interesting reading. The criticism heaped on the major figures involved - Philip Green, Mike Ashley and “fingers in the till” Dominic Chappell - has suggested they are rogues.

Editors and columnists have been at pains to separate their activities from the economic system that allowed them to thrive. It’s as if they have paraphrased a famous line by Tom Stoppard: “I’m with you on capitalism. It’s the capitalists I can’t stand.”

Green and Chappell, said the Daily Mail, are “shop-soiled capitalists”. And it asked: “How on earth were characters like these ever allowed to take charge of a company on which 11,000 workers, 21,000 pension scheme members and countless suppliers depended for their livelihoods? “

I’ll let you supply the obvious answer. Meanwhile, here’s the Sun’s take on Green and Ashley. They “give British business a bad name... We rightly celebrate the job-creating success of entrepreneurs, but this sort of callous behaviour tarnishes businesses everywhere.”

And it concluded: “Time for the billionaires to get their act together.” Really? Do we trust billionaires to do that? Surely, it should that not read: “Time for non-billionaires to get their acts together.”

But that, of course, would mean regulating billionaires and regulating capitalism, which is something of a no-no for the Sun (and especially its billionaire owner).

So what does Rupert Murdoch’s other title, the Times, have to say? In a leading article headlined “Crass capitalism”, it referred to the “wider moral.” It said:

“Enterprise at its best is about hard work, ingenuity and innovation. That produces valuable employment and everyone involved takes a share.”

But Ashley built a business “on zero-hours contracts and terrible working conditions” while Green’s BHS “was nothing more than a cost-cutting exercise.” The Times stated:

“The virtue of vigorous enterprise is greater than this... Capitalism has created and spread prosperity like no system before it, but it needs to be invigilated morally so that charlatans do not take over.”

Asset-stripping that sentence, I think moral invigilation, in the real world, means the imposition of tighter regulation.

The Daily Telegraph was having none of it. Noting that Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, “wants yet more laws to regulate businesses”, the paper was outraged at the very notion.

Such an idea “cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.” It continued with a forthright defence of light-touch regulation:

“Business is the world’s most powerful engine of prosperity and progress: successful companies do not exploit their workers or pilfer their pensions, they make them richer. They also deliver cheaper, better products that improve the lives of customers.

Whatever the failings of particular companies or individuals, capitalism as an economic system works and has delivered greater increases in human wealth, health and happiness than any other way of doing things.”

Sports Direct and BHS were “aberrant but eye-catching cases.” Firms that break the rules “by tampering with pension funds and mistreating staff... are the ignoble exception to a successful rule: profitseeking businesses make us all richer and more free.”

And the Daily Express? It had no comment about the issue at all. I wonder why.

The Daily Mirror’s said the “rancid details” about BHS “painted a terrible picture of life at the top of corporate Britain” and hoped the “notoriously prickly Green” would be held to account by MPs.

But its short editorial was altogether less effective than the way it presented the story across a spread, headlined “The Damned.”

And in an online comment, it called on Green to sell one of his “floating gin palaces, plug the gaping black hole in the pension fund and pay decent redundancy terms to loyal grafters who are losing their livelihoods through no fault of their own.”