Here comes Sir Philip Green, pleading poverty from Monaco. Or rather, it’s Lady Green, as the owner of the Arcadia fashion empire, who wants to shrink the business by 23 stores and would like landlords to take a whack in the form of rent cuts and lease re-jigs on another 194 premises in the UK. Arcadia’s Topshops in the US will close. And the affected UK landlords can have 20% of the proceeds from any future sale of Arcadia.

One assumes the Greens think this proposal stands a sporting chance of being accepted by creditors, but two points are worth making. First, the proposed equity injection into Arcadia, at £50m, looks tiny. The company can grumble about “challenging retail headwinds” but the other reason for the state of disrepair is lack of investment. In the context of a group of Arcadia’s size, an extra £50m looks a drop in the Med.

Second, the other parties here are the pension fund trustees, the Pensions Regulator and Pension Protection Fund. It is hard to believe any will be impressed by a proposal for Lady G to inject an extra £100m into the pension schemes over three years while Arcadia itself halves regular annual payments to £25m. That barely moves the dial when the deficit is £750m on one accounting basis and memories of BHS are fresh.

Company voluntary arrangements are an exercise in negotiation. In the shoes of the landlords – and definitely in the position of the pension bodies – you would be unwise to think the Greens’ offer is their best. On pensions, at least, the owners can surely do better than this.

British Steel is the chance to show joined-up policy

British Steel’s fall into insolvency is “a very big setback” but is “far from being the end”, said the business secretary, Greg Clark. The first part of that statement is obviously correct. Proving the truth of the second is where he’ll earn his ministerial salary, assuming he’s not swept away in the latest Westminster carnival.

On day one, Clark made some correct moves. The government has provided an indemnity to the official receiver to allow him to continue to pay wages and operate British Steel’s assets, an essential requirement given that blast furnaces, once turned off, tend to stay shut.

And Greybull Capital, British Steel’s former owner, is now out of the picture, which is a small mercy. We’ll await the receiver’s report to learn how much genuine risk capital Greybull contributed since 2016, but it’s clear that, when the going got tough, the unlovely private equity outfit was unwilling to dig deep.

The challenge for Clark is to find a more suitable owner. His mention of “expressions of interest” is encouraging but the government will probably have to assemble a financial package to convert interest into a deal. It should push the limits of the state-aid rules to do so.

The knock-on effects of the irreversible closure of the Scunthorpe steelworks would be horrendous. Jobs and environmental clean-up costs top the list, but Clark should also consider the impact on the competitive position of UK customers, not least state-owned Network Rail.

If you really want to operate a joined-up industrial policy, now’s the moment to show how it’s done. A public-private partnership won’t be the government’s preferred outcome, but it should be prepared to go there.

M&S – big returns on small risk for underwriters

“As we change the culture of the business we are clear that challenging costs will become a core part of our philosophy,” says Marks & Spencer. So where was the challenge to City bankers’ practice of gouging the client with fees in rights issues?

M&S’s cash-call, officially a £601m affair, will raise only £571m by the time the underwriting banks, lawyers and advisers have taken their cut. The £30m of “fees and expenses” might be defensible if the underwriters, who will collect about half the sum, were shouldering genuine risks. But they’re not.

M&S’s shares would have to collapse by 26% in the next three weeks for the underwriters to be on the hook. That risk is remote. Current trading is in the public domain; the dividend cut was priced in; the terms of the partnership with Ocado, the reason for the cash-call, haven’t changed one jot.

M&S reckons it got the going rate on fees. Within a rotten system, it probably did. But try explaining to shopfloor staff how £30m is fair.