Why can’t the UK be more like Marks & Spencer?

Marks & Spencer was a 20th-century paradigm of better business: a trusted brand and a benign employer that built strong relationships with suppliers and generated handsome returns for shareholders. Then its performance began to fade, as one management team after another failed to keep pace with retail trends in-store and online. By August 2020, when it announced 7,000 job cuts and ‘multi-level consultation [on] further streamlining’, I was moved to predict M&S would end up as no more than ‘a chain of upmarket convenience food stores and a website that’s handy for sending flowers and chocolates’.

But I misjudged the residual loyalty of middle-class shoppers. Lately they have been returning in large numbers to increase M&S’s share of the womenswear and grocery markets – knocking spots off Waitrose in the latter sector. Stores refurbished as part of a major investment programme were reported to have performed particularly well over Christmas. If the trend is sustained, then M&S is back – and in a Britain otherwise falling apart in so many aspects, who could deny that’s uplifting news?

Kudos to chief executive Stuart Machin, who began as a teenage shelf-stacker at Sainsbury’s.