The new senior partner sets out his stall

The trade could only gasp at the figures Charlie Mayfield revealed a fortnight ago. Next week, the new chairman of John Lewis Partnership hopes they’ll be gasping again as he opens 17,000 square feet of food hall at John Lewis in Oxford Street. No, not quite a Waitrose, but something that he claims will be different, the result of ‘co-operation between Waitrose and John Lewis’. If you thought that as sister companies they were on the same side, then you really don’t know how big corporations work. And JLP, as it is inevitably called by its executives, is a big corporation nowadays, with 68,000 employees — oops, sorry, partners — 26 stores, 185 supermarkets and sales of £6.4 billion a year.

Most people know that JLP is not as those other big, beastly retailers. It really is a partnership, owned by its employees, a business model which is vanishingly rare in Britain for enterprises of any size.