To save the High Street, sack Mary Portas and slash business rates

On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in front of a row of abandoned shops; then townsfolk dance in the street at the news that she has ‘buggered off in a taxi’. Call me an old cynic, but I think turning stars into tsars is a sign of Downing Street desperation: witness Alan Sugar’s lame stint as ‘enterprise champion’ in the dying days of Gordon Brown, and wince at James Caan from Dragon’s Den tackling social mobility. What I heard from the people of my own town, Helmsley in North Yorkshire, was not disappointment at being pipped by Margate and Market Rasen for a place in the first batch of Portas Pilot Towns chosen from ‘371 brilliant individual bids’ — I fear we forgot to post ours — but simple anger over business rates.