I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Sir Philip meets Sir Humphrey

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

The appointment of fashion re-tailer Sir Philip Green to be David Cameron’s adviser on public-sector waste looks even more improbable than Sir Richard Branson’s stint as Margaret Thatcher’s ‘litter tsar’. The BHS billionaire and the Virgin balloonist both operate through offshore private companies partly because they can, but mostly because their maverick business styles and uneasy relations with the media just don’t suit them to the public arena. But both (like Alan Sugar, Labour’s distinctly uncomfortable ‘enterprise tsar’) have an aura of celebrity that politicians hope will rub off: hence Cameron’s choice of Green rather than the less glamorous Simon Wolfson of Next, who would have been a safer, more cerebral choice and had certainly been hoping for the job. Green’s passage through Whitehall is bound to be stormy, and will probably be brief.

One illustration of Green’s combative modus operandi occurred in 2004 when he launched a hostile bid for Marks & Spencer, only to find himself thwarted by the appointment of Stuart Rose (who Green had tried to recruit for his bid team) as chief executive of M&S. Arriving at his office one day, Rose opened the car door to find Green steaming across the pavement towards him. According to his biographers, Green — who seemed to have been waiting nearby in his blacked-out Mercedes — started to drag Rose out of the car, shouting ‘I want a fucking word with you’, and during the 20-minute eyeball-to-eyeball that followed, rang his wife Tina in Monte Carlo and handed the phone to Rose so that Tina could join in the shouting. Afterwards, Green laughed dismissively: ‘If I’d been serious, he’d have gone through the window.’