1.

Defenestration

Envy and jealousy, my doctor told me, are two incurable diseases. I have done nothing wrong.

Sir Philip Green to the BHS select committee, 15 June 2016

There are times as a journalist when you step back and think: Is this really happening?

The morning of 23 April 2016 was one of those moments. It was a bright spring Saturday, and the king of the high street was threatening to kill me.

I was a thirty-two-year-old reporter on the Sunday Times. I had spent the past year pursuing Sir Philip Green, the billionaire owner of brands such as Topshop, asking awkward questions about his sale of the department-store chain BHS, once known as British Home Stores. For the token sum of £1, Green had passed the tired high-street institution and its 164 shops – heavily loss-making, riddled with asbestos and struggling to support a huge pension liability – to a charlatan with no real business experience. Dominic Chappell, the buyer, had turned out to be a serial bankrupt and a fantasist. From the start, I had suspected Green was trying to distance himself from BHS’s inevitable collapse and the whopping £571 million pension bill that would land on his desk if it happened under his watch. With an estimated family fortune of £3.2 billion, he could easily have afforded to make good his debt to BHS’s 20,000 pension-fund members. Now, little more than a year on from the sale, I caught wind that BHS was about to file for administration. The previous evening, one of my best contacts had called me as I travelled home from work. ‘Monday’s going to be a big day for the retail industry,’ he teased. I hurried home, rang him back and pleaded for the full story. Green still held BHS’s strings like a puppet master because he was its biggest lender and had the power to call in his loan. ‘Philip’s had enough,’ my source confided. ‘He’s going to put BHS under.’

That Saturday morning, I sat at my desk on the ninth floor of the Sunday Times building in London Bridge and looked out at the springtime light glowing over Southwark. Swallowing the knot of fear that always preceded a call to Green, I dialled his number. We both knew that BHS’s demise would bring the pension scandal out into the open.

The tycoon answered on the first ring.

‘You know I’m not going to talk to you, don’t you,’ he said, his voice gravelly yet nasal. This was the latest in a series of skirmishes we had fought. I told Green that I was working on a new story about BHS. ‘What a shock!’ he replied, not missing a beat.

I put it to him that a firm of insolvency specialists based in Manchester, Duff & Phelps, had been lined up to place the department store into administration. This time there was a pause. ‘Incorrect,’ Green said. ‘OK? All of it incorrect. OK? So be careful what you’re writing. I’m not going to engage with you, I’m going to engage with your editor. Whatever answers you get, you write what the fuck you like. You don’t give a fuck about the consequences.’

I told Green that I would write what I thought was the truth. That provoked a volcanic eruption. ‘If you want to come and call me a liar, come round to my office on Monday, call me a liar to my face and face the consequences,’ he shouted. ‘How’s that, if you’re such a big fucking boy? Because you will get thrown through the fucking window. You’re not a nice individual. You couldn’t give a fuck what trouble you cause. I find it pretty sad that the Sunday Times can’t find anything better to put on their front page than BHS.’

This was the king of the high street as the public never heard him. Mr Toad-like in appearance, with a bulging belly and a mischievous grin, Green was a business celebrity, often spotted on the front row of fashion shows between Kate Moss and Anna Wintour. Nut-brown from the Monaco sun, his silver hair slicked back into a rat’s tail, he relished the role he had carved out for himself as the retail industry’s roguish uncle. Bankers from Goldman Sachs and HSBC fell over themselves to offer him money and advice. Simon Cowell and Ronnie Wood attended his parties. He had paid his wife almost £2 billion of offshore dividends from his high-street empire and made two headline-grabbing hostile takeover attempts for Marks & Spencer. He had been knighted by Tony Blair despite his family’s address in a tax haven – a striking example of New Labour’s intensely relaxed attitude to the filthy rich – and been made a special adviser to David Cameron.

Green loved to manipulate the media, and the Sunday Times had previously been his favourite newspaper. Just nine months before that expletive-laden phone call, relations had been good enough for Green to invite me and the business editor to the tenth anniversary party of his Fashion Retail Academy, the not-for-profit venture that earned him his knighthood. The event, held at the grand Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, was classic Green. The ornate interior was transformed into a kind of nightclub, with turquoise lights flashing and dance music pounding. The main hall was packed with the crème de la crème of both business and politics. The Topshop boss sat in a prime position, wearing an open-necked shirt, flanked by Marc Bolland, then chief executive of M&S, and Tony Blair. Vernon Kay, the TV presenter, sashayed onstage with a mock catwalk strut to present the evening’s entertainment. Blair gave the first speech, recalling how civil servants had warned him the larger-than-life businessman could be ‘quite direct’ in a briefing before Green visited Number Ten to discuss his idea for the academy – ‘which indeed he was … Philip never graduated from the school of diplomacy, he graduated from the school of life,’ the former prime minister said. He recounted how he had asked Green, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And Green had quipped, ‘You’re a politician – I don’t expect you to do anything.’ Blair praised him as ‘the person who thought up the dream and dreamt the dream into reality’.

Green was uncharacteristically modest when he took to the podium, his market trader’s voice somehow softer at the edges. ‘Ten years seem to have gone by in a flash,’ he said, fiddling with his reading glasses. ‘I don’t want to spend the next year thanking all the people who have been involved in making this happen, but it’s taken more than just me.’

Paloma Faith closed the party with an acoustic performance of the pop drum ’n’ bass hit ‘Changing’. It was unintentionally apt. That evening in 2015 was the end of an era – the last time Green would be able to attract grand guests and lord it over the retail industry. Beneath the event’s glitzy surface, insiders were already murmuring about the dubious deal he had done on BHS. Those who looked closely saw he was unshaven and had dark rings under his eyes. He seemed tired and shifty when he gave an interview to the editor of a trade magazine at the end of the night. The journalist suggested that Green had originally contacted Blair to ask for his support for the academy. ‘No, no, he called me,’ Green snapped, his eyes flicking to the camera.

On 24 April 2016 – despite his denials – the Sunday Times broke the news that changed everything. The article, headlined ‘BHS on the Brink as Rescue Talks Fail’, exposed a behind-the-scenes power struggle between Green and Chappell. It said the row was ‘likely to tip BHS into administration’ the next morning, putting 11,000 jobs at risk, and it noted that Green and his partners had taken out more than £400 million of dividends before the enormous pension deficit emerged. As the BBC picked up the report on Sunday morning, Green called the Sunday Times’ business editor, Dominic O’Connell, to complain. He ranted about how unfair the coverage had been. Exasperated after a year of heavy-handed lobbying from the billionaire, O’Connell declared that BHS’s failure was Green’s own fault and hung up. As their relationship disintegrated over the following weeks, Green threatened O’Connell, advising him, ‘Be careful next time you’re walking down a dark alley on your way home.’ ‘Really, Philip?’ asked the incredulous editor.

Green told business associates he thought the press would quickly tire of BHS’s collapse. Clearly, he underestimated the strength of public feeling. On Monday 25th, the crisis made the front pages of The Guardian and the Daily Mirror. On Tuesday 26th, the Daily Mail splashed with the headline, ‘Sharks Who Bled BHS Dry’. The Mail story said that ‘Sir Philip Green pocketed £400 million from the 164-store chain before presiding over its decline and selling it for just £1’. Richard Fuller, a Conservative MP, revived the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’ slogan first applied in the 1970s to Tiny Rowland, the Lonrho tycoon who was accused of bribing African leaders and violating international sanctions on Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known. By Wednesday morning, Green was showing signs of strain. Duff & Phelps, which had been appointed early on Monday, organized a round-table meeting for the various parties involved at the headquarters of Green’s Arcadia Group behind Oxford Street in London. The professionals were brought in by a back door to avoid any journalists lurking at the front. Green waited for them at the end of a plush-carpeted corridor leading to the boardroom on the sixth floor, greeting each in turn. When it came to a property agent from Savills who had been appointed to review BHS’s store portfolio, he suddenly let rip. ‘Fucking Savills, you fucking cunts!’ he exploded at the bewildered agent, who assumed Green must have had some previous beef with the firm. ‘Your valuations always come in fucking millions below where they should be!’ The diatribe continued as the assembled cast took their seats around the boardroom table. Green then stopped and levelled a finger at an experienced lawyer from DLA Piper, who was sitting in stunned silence. ‘Who are you?’ he asked abruptly. The lawyer was so terrified he suffered what one onlooker described as a ‘complete meltdown’. ‘M-M-M,’ he stuttered, unable to get his name out. Phil Duffy, a bluff Mancunian who was running the administration for Duff & Phelps, had to intervene and make the introduction. From that point on, everyone spoke slowly and carefully, their eyes fixed on the table as if it held an autocue.

Green might have been able to control rooms filled with insolvency practitioners and lawyers, but he was unable to manage the media circus. Over the coming weeks, as thousands of mostly low-paid BHS staff lost their jobs and its pension-fund members were thrown into limbo, the Topshop boss became engulfed in his own personal Alamo. On 10 June, as the outcry became deafening, the Mail demanded the previously unthinkable on its front page, ‘Strip Sir Shifty of His Title!’ Five days later, he was hauled snarling before a special committee of MPs and accused of trying to duck his obligation to BHS’s pensioners. He promised Parliament that he would ‘sort it’, but not before putting on a display of remarkable petulance. Green barked at Richard Fuller, the Tory member who had deployed the Tiny Rowland barb, to stop ‘looking at me like that all the time’. He then made clear who he saw as the real victim. ‘I could be a murderer, the way they’re writing about me,’ Green complained. ‘I haven’t got any guns, but the stuff that’s getting written every day is pretty outrageous.’

Despite being in the middle of a firestorm, Green still found time to give me his frank views on the Sunday Times’ coverage of BHS’s collapse. ‘You think you’re being a fucking smartarse,’ he ranted down the phone, ‘writing this, that and the other. But let’s see the end of the movie. OK? When you’ve got to write across your front page an apology. Because that’s what the end of the movie will be.’

With no end in sight to the pension crisis, the tycoon thumbed his nose at public opinion and escaped for a two-month cruise around the Greek islands on his new £100 million superyacht, Lionheart, a 300ft floating village with its own helipad and swimming pool. Jean Costello, a BHS shop worker who had lost her job at the South Shields branch, went on ITV to give her opinion. ‘I could sit and cry, when I look at what he’s got, and I was coming down here with corned beef sandwiches on the train,’ she said. Throughout a long, torrid summer when the only other big news was the Brexit vote, tabloid reporters and paparazzi hired speedboats to pursue Green around the Mediterranean. Confronted by a Sky News crew on a morning constitutional walk around the harbour of Ithaca, he tussled with the cameraman, shouting, ‘That’s going to go in the fucking sea.’ Green’s wife, Tina, was unimpressed – both by her husband’s behaviour and by his treatment at the hands of a media that had built him up for so long. She texted a relative to say the events had been ‘devastating for our family’.

Attitudes towards brashness and wealth had shifted like tectonic plates since Green’s heyday in the mid-2000s – imperceptibly at first, then with unstoppable force. Two years on from that summer, Green still did not seem to understand. ‘If you want to make a fucking career out of Philip Green, don’t get it wrong,’ he warned when I approached him about this project. ‘Because I will sue your arse off if you write one word in that book that’s wrong.’ BHS may have disappeared, but his problems are far from over. Topshop’s sales are declining at an alarming rate and Arcadia has disclosed a pension deficit bigger than the shortfall that toppled BHS. The most famous retail tycoon of his generation faces the dilemma of a lifetime as he decides whether to stand and fight or extricate himself from his crumbling empire.

Green’s rise and fall is a story with profound implications for the way we live.

It is a tale of an exceptionally determined middle-class boy from north London who shunned a privileged education to learn business the hard way. It is about learning to detest the establishment while simultaneously craving its recognition. It is the story of the long post-war consumption boom that powered the expansion of property-heavy high-street chains, and the go-go years of cheap debt and weak corporate governance in the 1990s and 2000s, when some of those brands surrendered to takeover bids and were broken up. It is an indictment of the media and the political class, both of which were quick to venerate celebrity and wealth while turning a blind eye to bullying and threats. It is the story of how rag traders with quick minds and an instinct for the public’s desire to consume were overtaken by university graduates with cloud computers full of big data. Since Blair’s landslide election victory in 1997, online retail sales have gone from almost nothing to more than £60 billion a year, with competition becoming fiercer and smartphone shopping proliferating. BHS withered and died partly because of the shift in consumer spending. With former giants like Debenhams, M&S and Tesco struggling to adapt, BHS will not be the last household name to disappear.

Most of all, Green’s story is one of intense ambition undone by old-fashioned greed. In other words, it is the story of life in the early twenty-first century.