“Do I have to have a beer with either of them?” asks Iain Wright, the chairman of the Commons’ business select committee, when quizzed about which, of the two billionaires he interrogated during 2016, he would choose to meet for a Christmas pint.

“Do you know what? I think Mike Ashley would like a pint more than [Sir] Philip Green,” the Labour MP for Hartlepool says. “I don’t think Philip Green would want a pint. I think he’d probably want an extraordinarily expensive bottle of champagne ... and then he’d get me to pay for it.”

The quote just about sums up the year Wright has experienced at the centre of two separate scandals that engulfed a pair of Britain’s best known and wealthiest retailers.

There are parts of his statement that appear conciliatory, but then plenty more that would irk both tycoons who, according to Wright, have come to encapsulate the corporate excess that may have contributed to the country voting to leave the European Union.

Ashley was hauled in front of Wright’s business committee over working conditions at his sportswear chain Sports Direct, in the wake of a Guardian investigation that showed the company’s warehouse workers were being paid less than the national minimum wage. Business people have been dragged in front of MPs for much less, yet Ashley’s appearance did not happen without a fight.

The billionaire owner of Newcastle United football club initially refused to attend, despite Wright’s committee taking the unusual step of issuing him with a formal summons and then threatening to find him in contempt of parliament – an ancient offence which theoretically is punishable by imprisonment.

But parliament’s powers are so archaic that they may no longer be practically enforceable, meaning it was always unclear what could be done to Ashley if he failed to show – a move that would have put the whole select committee system on trial. At that moment, there must have been a lot of pressure on Wright?

“I didn’t feel any pressure at all,” he claims. “Maybe I should have. I felt it was a point of principle. Nobody’s bigger than parliament – I felt so strongly about that and I was keen to go to the wire ... You don’t refuse to come to a select committee – you just don’t.

“If necessary I would have been pushing to change the law to make sure it was a legal requirement to attend,” Wright adds. “You’ve seen with the likes of Margaret Hodge [the former chair of the public accounts committee] ... fantastic work [has been done by] the select committee. And all of that could have been put under threat if people think they don’t have to go.”

In the end, Ashley not only backed down but also made a string of admissions under the committee’s questioning, including acknowledging that Sports Direct had broken the law by not paying the minimum wage and confessing that he is struggling to control the company he founded and in which he still owns a majority stake.

“One of the great thing about the Beatles – and you can hear it in Abbey Road particularly – is the harmonies and I think the way we harmonised together was really strong,” Wright says. “We worked as one team, we left our committee badges at the door, we left our party affiliation at the door and we just worked to see what on earth went wrong here and how we try to mitigate that.”

He eventually settles on Field as Lennon, while also lauding a pair of Conservative MPs – Jeremy Quin from the pensions committee and Richard Fuller from Wright’s own business committee – for their contributions.

Even so, the two inquiries have had different outcomes. While the Sports Direct saga eventually produced some benefit for the poorly paid workers, when the £1m backpay deal was unveiled in August, Wright still seems to view the company’s efforts as a work in progress.

Meanwhile, the BHS pension scandal rumbles on into 2017, with Green still promising to “sort” the deficit and the pension regulator launching formal legal proceedings in November against Green and Dominic Chappell, the businessman he sold BHS to for £1.

Given the different outcomes, it would be good to know if Wright sees his Christmas pint glass as half empty or half full.