A crisis at the John Lewis Partnership? A plunge of 99% in first-half profits to just £1.2m looks terrible, but it’s not like the late 1990s. Back then, there was a proper mess. John Lewis was seen as inward-looking, bureaucratic and unable to keep pace with modern retailing. Survival seemed at stake. At head office they even wondered whether to abandon employee ownership and become a regular plc.

Today’s woes look tame by comparison. Management may have been slow to spot trouble – the 1,800 redundancies in the last 12 months look a little rushed – but the Waitrose half of the operation is stable. Its operating profits fell 12% in the half but the full-year outcome is predicted to be better than last time, implying a figure above £172m. It won’t be the £253m of two years ago but every supermarket chain is learning to live with lower margins.

The department stores swung to an operating loss of £33m in “the most promotional market we’ve seen in almost a decade,” as chairman Sir Charlie Mayfield put it. Well, yes, House of Fraser and Debenhams have been flapping wildly and can’t be ignored by a business with a “never knowingly undersold” price promise. That pledge is painful for the business now, but the long-term view is surely correct – it has to be maintained in all weathers.

The fall in sterling, shoving up the cost of imported goods, is also a fact of life, even if Brexit secretary Dominic Raab would like to pretend otherwise. But the department stores’ customers seem to be loyal since revenues were virtually flat. It could be worse. Elton John is rumoured for the Christmas ad. John Lewis would be pushing its luck with Rocket Man, but I’m Still Standing would work.

Diamond’s hindsight is less than crystal clear

Bob Diamond emerges from The Bank That Lived a Little, Philip Augar’s superb recent history of modern Barclays, as a more rounded individual than you might expect. The ultra-competitive American with a blind-spot on bonuses is fully present, of course. But Diamond also led Barclays’ creation of an investment bank that could compete on Wall Street, a challenge that defeated every other UK bank that tried. That required skill as well as ambition.

So Diamond’s reflections 10 years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers ought to be noteworthy. Unfortunately, he has offered an absurdly self-serving account.

First, Diamond argued in an interview with the BBC that the public should be angry with Royal Bank of Scotland for requiring bail-outs but “HSBC and Barclays deserve credit for raising capital privately” and not putting themselves at risk. Come on, Barclays enjoyed a huge slice of luck in 2007 when it lost the battle with RBS to buy ABN Amro, the deal that holed the Edinburgh-based bank.

The supposed safety features in Barclays’ version – paying in shares, not cash, and buying all of ABN, not just the rotten wholesale division – could easily have failed. Even Barclays’ directors glimpsed danger. Augar records the board fretting in September 2007, in the early days of the credit crisis, that RBS would pull out.

Barclays was also lucky that then-chancellor Alistair Darling killed the next adventure – the 11th-hour attempt to buy Lehman before its bankruptcy, as opposed to picking up some non-toxic pieces afterwards. That would not have ended well. And it’s not as if Barclays got no help from the UK public. It raised its capital privately (and controversially) in the Middle East but, like all big UK banks, Barclays benefitted from credit guarantees underwritten by the UK government.

Second, he still defends the culture of Barclays. “I don’t think the reprehensible behaviour of a few people out of 160,000 employees is representative of the culture we had at Barclays – I think we had a very strong culture,” he told the BBC.

Yes, there were worse culprits who paid even bigger conduct penalties. But recall a line from City lawyer Anthony Salz’s in-depth review in 2013: “The culture that emerged tended to favour transactions over relationships, the short term over sustainability, and financial over other business purposes.” That is not what most people would call “strong”.

Third, Diamond now says he fears banks have become too cautious in their risk-taking and so can’t support growth in the economy. Try telling that to Barclays’ shareholders as they look at a share price of 172p versus 700p in the old days. At the last count, there were £180bn of risk-weighted assets in Barclays’ corporate and investment bank, which sounds like quite enough risk, especially as the successors have yet to work out how to make consistent returns from Diamond’s creation.

He is free to push his glossy account, of course. But it would be alarming if today’s bankers pine for his vision. Sadly, one suspects many do.