3.

The Bond Street Bandit

On 2 June 1953, thousands of people camped overnight in the wet to cheer and wave flags as Queen Elizabeth was drawn down The Mall in a state coach for her coronation. Many were wrapped in soaked newspapers or plastic raincoats, but they were jubilant at catching a glimpse of their twenty-seven-year-old monarch. The general excitement was enhanced by the news that a British team had just reached the summit of Mount Everest. The Daily Express captured the moment with the famous headline, ‘All this – and Everest too!’

The coronation, that most traditional of events, carried with it the seeds of social change. As well as securing the national treasure status of Richard Dimbleby, who presented the BBC’s coverage, it marked the real birth of television. Modernizers led by the Duke of Edinburgh won the argument for broadcasting, and more than 20 million people crowded around 2.5 million TV sets to watch. Within a year, licence numbers had increased to 3.5 million, and by 1960 there were 10 million TV sets in use, with half the population watching at peak time. The introduction of commercial TV in 1955, and programmes like ITV’s Double Your Money, which featured a £1,000 ‘treasure trail’ for contestants, horrified traditionalists but started to brush away some of the fustiness of post-war Britain. A new spirit of American-style consumerism blew in.

Philip Green, whose first birthday had been celebrated a few months earlier, was born at a unique economic tipping point. Years of post-war austerity were coming to an end, replaced by a new positivity. The British were tired of hardship. In 1951, the Labour government cut the weekly meat ration to its lowest ever level – ‘not bigger than a matchbox’, according to the Popular Pictorial. Part of the Conservatives’ pitch to voters was a promise to do away with rationing altogether. Churchill’s party won the 1951 election despite the Daily Mirror’s attempt to portray him as a warmonger with his finger on the nuclear button. The new prime minister’s assessment of the situation that winter was grim. According to the historian David Kynaston, Churchill asked his minister of food, Gwilym Lloyd-George, to show him a person’s rations. ‘Not a bad meal, not a bad meal,’ the prime minister clucked as he examined the provisions. ‘But these are not rations for a meal or for a day,’ Lloyd-George exclaimed. ‘They are for a week.’

Ham and tea came off the ration in 1952, followed by chocolate and sweets in 1953 – for some, an event just as momentous as the coronation. Rationing of butter, cheese, cooking fat and margarine ended in May 1954, followed by meat two months later. There was a short-term spike in the price of bacon and steak as butchers struggled to cope with demand. The average person’s weekly intake of sugar, fresh fruit, bacon and ham soared. At the same time, food and drink fell as an overall percentage of consumers’ spending, with proportionally more money going on cars and housing. The historian Peter Hennessy described the 1950s as ‘a decade of easement without previous parallel in British economic and social history’.

A shortage of working-age men after the war produced a tightness in the labour market, and with full employment, wages started to rise. Between the Conservatives’ election victory in 1951 and the next Labour government in 1964, the average weekly wage more than doubled to £18 7s. – well ahead of inflation. The ending of hire-purchase restrictions in 1958 meant that shoppers were suddenly able to rush out and buy cars, fridges, furniture and TVs on credit. A Daily Mail cartoon after Harold Macmillan’s comprehensive Tory election victory in 1959 showed the new prime minister sitting back in his armchair, remarking to a collection of white goods, ‘Well, gentlemen, I think we all fought a good fight.’

This was the great consumer explosion that powered the growth of chains like BHS, C&A, Dixons, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Woolworths. Simon Marks, the legendary M&S chairman, captured the spirit of the time when he told the company’s 1954 annual meeting, ‘With more abundant supplies at our disposal, and the lifting of restrictions which for so many years hampered our freedom of action, we have been able to take steps systematically to improve our values over a wide range of goods.’ That year, the government scrapped building licences, a bureaucratic system of controls that gave government ministries first refusal to occupy new developments. Oliver Marriott, a former Sunday Times City editor and author of The Property Boom, told the story of an unlucky young trader who sold a building in London’s Grafton Street a week before the announcement only to see its value shoot up by 70 per cent, literally overnight.

These were fertile conditions for Green’s childhood hero, Sir Charles Clore. Clore was born in the East End of London in 1904, the son of Jewish immigrants who fled pogroms in Latvia in the late nineteenth century. His parents, Israel and Yetta Claw, had arrived at the docks in Liverpool with a few pounds and a sewing machine and made their way to the ‘Mittel East’, as the area around Shoreditch and Bethnal Green was jokingly known. It was described by the writer Emanuel Litvinoff as ‘a district populated by persecuted Jews from the Russian empire and transformed into a crowded East European ghetto full of synagogues, backroom factories and little grocery stores reeking of pickled herring, garlic sausage and onion bread’. Clore’s father, who quickly anglicized his name, ran a tailor’s shop. His mother died in childbirth when Clore was five. Ten years later, his father’s second wife committed suicide. According to Charles Gordon, one of his biographers, Clore had ‘the force of granite’ and ‘cobalt eyes [that] made people cringe’. He grew up with what Gordon described as a ‘cynical and melancholic view of life’. ‘He expected the worst of people and was rarely surprised,’ Gordon said.

Clore’s nickname at school was ‘Poppy’, a slang word for money. He started out buying properties such as the Cricklewood skating rink in north-west London and the Prince of Wales theatre in Piccadilly. Flat-footed and mildly diabetic, he escaped being drafted for the Second World War and instead made a fortune speculating on properties at depressed prices. But it was the rise of consumerism in the 1950s that turned the taciturn boy from Bethnal Green into the godfather of corporate raiders and the richest man in Britain. With employment at full capacity and the economy growing at 3 per cent a year, consumption boomed. Retailers’ profits expanded on the back of the unprecedented high-street spending, but they also faced higher taxes to pay for the nascent welfare state, which the Tories had maintained. As a result, many were reluctant to increase their dividends to shareholders, who became frustrated. At the same time, some of those companies were conservative about the way they revalued their property portfolios, which in reality were soaring. In other words, the stock market was full of ripe fruit that could be plucked cheaply – if someone could only find a way to reach it.

In 1953, Clore pulled off a deal that revolutionized takeovers in Britain. He had already dabbled in retail companies such as Richard Shops when Douglas Tovey, a gregarious estate agent, visited him at home in Mayfair with an idea. Tovey pointed out that J. Sears & Co., famous owner of the shoe chains Freeman, Hardy & Willis and Trueform, was stuffed with property assets. The morning after their drink, Tovey sent Clore an Exchange Telegraph card setting out Sears’ financial details. Its 920 shops were in the books at £6 million. Tovey estimated they would be worth at least £10 million on the open market. Clore gathered his closest advisers and laid a plan.

The problem was the City of the early 1950s. In size and social mores, it was still a Victorian village. Bankers wore bowler hats and shirts with detachable collars and cuffs. Messenger boys ran between buildings delivering notes. The principal characters all knew one another, often from school days, and deals were regularly done on a handshake. The gentlemanly way to take over a listed company was to approach its board of directors and agree a price. Hostile takeovers – where a bidder made an offer direct to a company’s shareholders without the directors’ approval – were almost unheard of. Yet that is what Clore had in mind for Sears. No British merchant bank would finance him, so he turned to Bank of America, which was familiar with contentious deals from the US. Out of the blue, in February 1953, Clore announced his takeover bid. Sears’ management panicked and raised the dividend from 22.5 per cent to 66.5 per cent – a move that undermined their credibility, since shareholders then questioned why it had been kept so low in the first place. After a brief siege, Clore won control of Sears. According to David Clutterbuck and Marion Devine, two of Clore’s biographers, the shell-shocked chairman spluttered, ‘We never thought anything like this would happen to us.’ Clore sent Tovey a letter thanking him for the tip and pointing out with deadpan humour that he had slightly overestimated the value of the property surplus.

The coup astonished both the City and Westminster. Pundits started to quip about an era known as ‘Acquisitions BC’ – Before Clore. One newspaper said that Sears’ new boss was ‘today the subject of discussion in every boardroom. In every company making fat profits he is pictured as a big bad wolf who might gobble them up.’ Lord Bicester, of Morgan Grenfell, one of the oldest and most influential merchant banks, privately told the Bank of England that he was ‘very agitated about further manoeuvres by Mr Clore’. The Bank’s governor, Kim Cobbold, was forced to act that autumn when an emboldened Clore launched a hostile takeover bid for the Savoy Group, which included the Berkeley Hotel and Claridge’s. Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic patron of Claridge’s and the Savoy, made clear that he would not tolerate such impudence. The Savoy’s chairman deployed complicated tactics to fend off Clore and his bidding partner, controversially transferring ownership of the properties to the staff pension fund, putting them in the hands of the trustees. After the raiders backed down, Cobbold urged all banks ‘to use special caution in respect of any invitations coming before them which appear to be connected with these takeover operations’. There was a nasty smell of anti-Semitism as parts of Fleet Street branded Clore ‘the notorious West End financier’.

Undeterred by the criticism, he turned Sears into an acquisition machine, buying assets as disparate as Furness shipyard, the Selfridges department store and the bookmaker William Hill. He and his wife led a rarefied life, dividing their time between a townhouse behind Park Lane and a country home in Oxfordshire, but the Savoy controversy was the final straw for their troubled marriage. Francine Halphen, a beautiful war heroine who had won the Croix de Guerre as a Red Cross driver in the Battle of France, had met Clore at a friend’s Christmas lunch. She represented everything he lacked – she was cultured and connected, counting Sassoons and Rothschilds among her relatives – and they married in 1943 despite an awkward courtship. Francine, an independent woman who knew her own mind, grew tired of his obsession with work. She left Clore in 1956, when he was fifty-two. They divorced a year later. According to Charles Gordon, Clore then embarked on ‘a determined sexual rampage, never finding companionship, because he never sought it’. Christine Keeler, the call girl at the centre of the Profumo scandal, was believed to have been among his many mistresses. ‘It was a gluttony of shameful proportions,’ Gordon wrote.

It was a failed marriage of a different kind that ended Clore’s career. In 1959, Douglas Tovey, the agent who had brokered the Sears takeover, persuaded Clore to merge his extensive property interests with those of Jack Cotton, a flamboyant property developer from Birmingham. Cotton was a genial man who wore a bow tie and had a suite at the Dorchester on Park Lane, where he hung Renoir’s La Pensée. He turned out to be a terrible match for the hard, unforgiving Clore. The merger unravelled and Clore eventually pushed Cotton out. The ousted partner retired to the Bahamas in misery, drank himself into a stupor every night and died of a heart attack in 1964. Four years later, Clore and Cotton’s company, City Centre, was bought by a rival, Land Securities. The Daily Express cartoon of the day said, ‘I’m emigrating from this crazy, mixed-up country. Someone’s taking over Charlie Clore.’

In 1971, Clore was knighted for charitable giving. He grumbled that it should have come far sooner. He had bought estates in Herefordshire and Wiltshire and hosted shooting parties for newfound aristocratic friends, enjoying the acceptance to polite society he had always craved. Yet in 1976, just when he should have been relaxing, he surprised even his closest allies by announcing his intention to resign as chairman of Sears and go into tax exile. Clore planned to become a resident of Monaco to shield his enormous fortune from death duties, but he found himself unable to resist regular trips back to London. The most feared businessman of his generation cut a lonely figure as he wandered around five-star hotels in Europe. He died from complications relating to a bowel cancer operation in Harley Street in 1979, aged seventy-four. The Inland Revenue challenged Clore’s domicile. It won after a six-year legal battle and took £67 million of his £123 million estate. The High Court judge who delivered the verdict added a poignant personal note. ‘In his last two or three years the pattern of his life was greatly altered,’ Justice Nourse said. ‘Able, restless, cerebral without being intellectual or cultured, dutiful in religion but not spiritual, sometimes on the edge of loneliness or boredom, the impression with which the evidence has left me is of a final period of unhappiness and doubts.’

The trail blazed by Clore was followed by a long line of corporate raiders in the 1970s and 1980s. There was Jim Slater of the financial conglomerate Slater Walker, who was forced into early retirement after being convicted of minor Companies Act offences, and who later declared that ‘if a firm has its assets stripped it means they have not been properly used’; Lords Hanson and White, transatlantic playboys who built an empire ranging from Player’s cigarettes to Seven Sea vitamins, and who enjoyed cosy Friday afternoon whiskies with Margaret Thatcher; Sir James Goldsmith, a prolific dealmaker and womanizer, who put some of his multibillion-pound fortune into an early campaign for Britain to renegotiate its relationship with Europe; and Tiny Rowland, the cold-blooded boss of Lonrho, Africa’s biggest food producer, who used The Observer as his mouthpiece in the brutal fight with Al-Fayed over Harrods. But it was Sir Charles Clore – the flawed, ruthless retail and property tycoon from the East End of London – who captured the young Green’s imagination.

Although the two never met, the similarities between Green and Clore go far beyond a fondness for pinstripe suits and slicked-back grey hair. Green’s maternal great-grandparents, Mordekhai-Zev ‘Max’ Bull and Rivka ‘Rebecca’ Dimantstein, were Latvian refugees who came to Britain in the late nineteenth century and settled in Stoke Newington, north-east London. According to Chaim Freedman, a genealogist who has blogged about the Bull family, Mordekhai-Zev was a strict patriarch who cut ‘an imposing figure, immaculately dressed in a frock coat and high black skullcap’. Rivka was deeply religious, but simultaneously strong-willed enough to rebel against wearing the sheitel, a modesty wig worn by married Orthodox Jewish women. She liked smoking a pipe and wearing lipstick. The family home on Evering Road was known as a centre of study for the Orthodox community. Mordekhai-Zev also ran a wholesale fur-cutting business, M. Bull and Sons, on Kingsland Road in Dalston, on the fringe of the Mittel East. Harry Blacker, a painter and writer, described the surrounding area as ‘a conglomeration of narrow, cobbled streets, terraced houses, cat-smelling tenements and gas-lit cabinet-making workshops’. Stoke Newington was only slightly more salubrious.

The Bulls had ten children. One of their five sons, Ephraim, married Rose Ginsberg, who had mildly anglicized her surname from Gunzburg. In 1918, a month before the end of the First World War, Rose gave birth to a girl, Alma Constance Bull – Green’s mother. Her birth certificate gave the family’s address as Kings Road in Walton-on-Thames, a suburb in south-west London. The following year, they moved back to Stoke Newington and bought a house on Fountayne Road, a few minutes’ walk from Ephraim’s parents. Alma had two older brothers, Harold and Monty, and a younger sister, Annette. She went to the Skinners’ Company School for Girls in Stamford Hill, run by the furriers’ livery company. The main source of entertainment at weekends was the local synagogue, which put on afternoons of coffee and dancing. It was there that Alma, aged sixteen, met her future husband, Simon David Green. Simon lived on Osbaldeston Road, parallel to Fountayne Road.

Simon was four years older than Alma. He was born in 1914 as Simon David Terkeltaub, the son of Polish émigrés who moved to Britain. The address on his birth certificate was a maisonette on the main road running through Stamford Hill in north-east London. His father, Joseph Samuel Terkeltaub, was a greengrocer who did business from a shop in Finsbury Park and a stall on Thrawl Street, between Spitalfields market and Brick Lane in Shoreditch. Joseph went by the anglicized name Bernard Green, perhaps chosen for his profession. His wife, Sarah, looked after Simon and his four younger siblings – Annie, Jack, Bertie and Victor (born Avigidor).

A history of financial trauma ran through both Alma and Simon’s families. According to the London Gazette, Bernard Green was made bankrupt in 1926, when Simon was eleven. He was released from bankruptcy two years later, after which the family moved to Stoke Newington. Alma’s father, Ephraim, was also declared bankrupt in the London Gazette – in 1939, along with his brother, Emanuel, with whom he had been running M. Bull and Sons. Alma was twenty at the time. She went to work as a secretary for a lingerie company owned by Norman Feltz, nicknamed ‘Norman the Knicker King’ – father of the TV presenter Vanessa Feltz.

Simon applied to change his surname from Terkeltaub to Green by deed poll in April 1946, two months before he married Alma at the New Synagogue in Stamford Hill. Their families’ financial woes had affected them in different ways, and they made an odd couple. Alma, a petite blonde, was hard and unemotional. She was determined never to face money problems again. Simon, round-faced and podgy, was depressive and lugubrious. A black-and-white photograph from their wedding day shows Alma holding a bunch of flowers, an ambiguous expression on her lips. Simon was in a top hat and round-rimmed glasses, looking serious.

The Greens moved from Stoke Newington to Tamworth Road in Croydon. Elizabeth Anne, their first child, was born on 17 July 1948. Philip Nigel Ross, their second, arrived on 15 March 1952. Simon ran a business repairing radios and renting out TV sets. Alma opened the first coin-operated launderette in the area, followed by the first self-service petrol station. She opened several more garages and built a buy-to-let property portfolio. In 1956, as the family’s wealth grew, Alma and Simon decided to move to north London. They narrowed their search to Bancroft Avenue or Bishops Avenue, two of the best roads near Hampstead Garden Suburb. They picked Bancroft Avenue and bought a six-bedroom house at number 26.

The Greens’ family life was materially comfortable. Elizabeth went to South Hampstead High, a girls’ school with a mixture of fee-paying and direct-grant students. Philip went to Norfolk House, a private prep school where pupils had to wear bright orange blazers and matching caps. Simon drove an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, an upmarket car similar to a Rolls-Royce. They had a poodle called Coco and took family holidays at Birchington-on-Sea in Kent. Elizabeth and Philip’s upbringing was emotionally barren, however. Alma nagged and terrorized Simon, who began to complain of migraines. He would often stay in bed until the late afternoon, getting dressed only when Elizabeth came home from school in order to give his daughter the impression he had been to work. He was prescribed opiate painkillers for his crippling headaches. At some point, he became addicted. A relative said that Simon lived ‘like a functioning alcoholic’, keeping his electricals business going but struggling through the fog of every day.

Alma grew frustrated by her husband’s weakness. She starved her children of affection, relentlessly drilling into them the importance of making money above all else. The matriarch would play Elizabeth and Philip off against each other to toughen them up, making them compete for her approval. Conversations around the dinner table tended to take the form of arguments, with Elizabeth and Philip attacking each other, probing for soft spots. They developed similar personalities – aggressive, cocky and opinionated – and a strong mutual dislike festered. Their childhood was the beginning of a lifelong feud that was punctuated by occasional rapprochements at family events such as their mother’s birthday.

At the age of nine, Philip left Norfolk House for Carmel College, a private boarding school in Oxfordshire described by The Observer as ‘the Jewish Eton’. Carmel was founded in 1948 by Kopul Rosen, a charismatic rabbi who had a vision of combining the best parts of an English public-school education with an Orthodox religious induction. It went on to send a stream of bright Jewish boys to Oxford and Cambridge. Among its early governors and patrons were the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, the M&S chairman Israel Sieff and the retail tycoon Sir Isaac Wolfson. Carmel opened on a site near Newbury in Berkshire with twenty-two pupils, but by 1953 it had moved to Mongewell Park, a former RAF base near Wallingford. The main building was a grand Victorian house that inspired the mansion in Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap.

When Green arrived in 1961, the school was still being built. Many of the lessons were held in prefabricated RAF huts. Corporal punishment was rare. There were daily prayers and Hebrew lessons. Shabbat – the period of rest between Friday night and Saturday night – was strictly observed. A former pupil said, ‘You had religion thrown down your throat, and you were made to live it on such a high level that you either accepted it as your future way of life or you rejected it.’ But Carmel also had a heated indoor swimming pool and generous playing fields. It was set in idyllic countryside: a trout stream ran from hatcheries to an overgrown lake that flowed over a small waterfall into the Thames, where the school’s rowing teams practised.

In the 1960s, Carmel was one of only a few boarding schools to offer a backdrop of Jewish culture and religion, and its fees were more expensive than those charged by Eton. The purple uniform had to be purchased at Harrods. Some pupils were dropped off by chauffeur at the start of term, and one was driven to and from London every day. Another boy arrived by helicopter. ‘You had to be pretty damn rich to go there, or very successful in terms of negotiating a grant or scholarship,’ said Toni Rauch, a direct contemporary of Green’s.

Rauch said that Green was ‘not one of the Rolls-Royce brigade’, but neither was he one of the hardest-up: Rauch remembered his peer from Hampstead Garden Suburb as ‘just one of the guys’. ‘There were one or two scraps, particularly when it came to a selection of ping-pong bats and who got the good-condition red one and who got the bad-condition green one,’ he said. ‘[But] I don’t remember Philip being good at anything, specifically. He wasn’t a specifically high-calibre sportsman. I would never have dreamed in a pink month of Sundays that he would turn himself into the person he did. From the point of view of his business acumen, all credit to him. What he’s grown into in terms of his total arrogance is a whole different ball game. He certainly wasn’t that type of kid at school.’

Kopul Rosen died of leukaemia in 1962, aged forty-eight. With the passing of its idealistic founder, Carmel gradually lost its sense of direction. The school closed in 1997 after years of dwindling student numbers and mounting financial difficulties. Toni Rauch added that a group of twelve old boys from his year still met occasionally for a ‘mini-reunion’ lunch. ‘We always talk about Philip, but Philip has not made any attempt to be in contact with any of us,’ he said. ‘One or two of us have invited him, but he’s never responded at all.’

Matthew Engel, a Financial Times journalist who was in the year above Green, remembered him differently. ‘The child was very much the father of the man,’ he said. ‘When I started seeing him in the newspapers years later, he was instantly recognizable. As I remember, he had chutzpah – but it was a petulant kind of chutzpah rather than an engagingly cheeky chutzpah.’ Engel said that Green was ‘certainly not considered a clever kid’ at the intensely academic school. He added, ‘A lot of my contemporaries either went into a family business or the professions, and he was very much an exception. There’s certainly no one from Carmel who started with nothing and achieved what he achieved.’

Green was twelve when his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Simon Green was just forty-nine. His death certificate stated that he suffered from obesity and high blood pressure. According to a family story, Alma reacted with a characteristic lack of emotion. She is said to have telephoned one of Simon’s siblings and told him, ‘Your brother’s lying here dead. You’d better come and deal with it.’ Simon left an estate valued at £12,520 – the equivalent of about £240,000 in today’s money. He bestowed annuities of £5 a week each on his mother, Sarah, and his father-in-law, Ephraim. The rest of his estate was put into a trust for his wife.

Alma was already driving to south London every day. She took over Simon’s electricals shop on top of her own launderette, petrol stations and properties. Alma was a typical conservative, with both a small and a capital C. She read the Daily Mail, complained about immigration and loved cigarettes. After work, she liked to gamble – or ‘spiel’ – at Les Ambassadeurs casino on Park Lane, where she and a schoolfriend, Phyllis Gould, later became known as ‘The Duracell Girls’ for their ability to play roulette deep into the night. One of Green’s early business associates, George Malde, estimated that Alma’s buy-to-let portfolio comprised sixty or seventy houses in the Croydon area. He described driving her around on Fridays in the 1980s, collecting the rent in cash and emptying electricity and gas meters. ‘She was tough,’ said Malde. ‘No-nonsense. All the guys paid up or she would get them out.’ Alma employed two ‘heavy’ builders who doubled as bailiffs. ‘If there was a problem with rent, they would throw them out,’ Malde said. ‘Different world in those days. You can’t do that now.’

Green must have been embarrassed by his father’s failure to provide for the family: he rarely spoke of Simon after his death, even to his closest associates. Now, before he was even a teenager, he was thrust into the role of patriarch. His mother had always been the dominant force in his life. Green was desperate to make money and win her approval. In an in-depth interview with The Guardian in 2004, the tycoon said he started coming home at weekends and working at Alma’s petrol stations, topping up oil and wiping windscreens. Customers would tip him – sixpence, a shilling, sometimes half a crown. ‘Half a crown,’ he told the interviewer with a nostalgic smile. ‘Remember them? Nice heavy coin, that.’

At Carmel, Green’s behaviour deteriorated. He was placed in the lowest academic stream. To Alma’s chagrin, her son left suddenly at fifteen. One of the Greens’ neighbours saw him go off to Carmel as usual at the start of term. Three or four days later, he was surprised to spot Green back in Bancroft Avenue, ‘skulking along, looking not very happy’. The neighbour asked one of Green’s contemporaries at Carmel what had happened and was told he had been expelled. He asked why. There was a two-word answer, ‘For fucking.’ The neighbour joked that he ‘didn’t discover whether it was another boy, the matron, or a cat’. Toni Rauch said that Green was rumoured to have ‘had some sexual experimentation’ with one of his male friends. ‘There was a limited amount of homosexual activity going on at the time, because we were all in our puberty and we were exclusively, at that point in time, a boys’ school,’ Rauch said. He added, ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was an expellable situation, from a pastoral point of view.’ David Stamler, Green’s old headmaster, said, ‘I have no recollection of an expulsion. It was a sufficiently rare thing that I would certainly remember. I think there’s no truth in that whatsoever.’ Stamler described Green as ‘a perfectly normal sort of schoolboy. Possibly better at sports than certain academic subjects, but nothing special comes to mind.’

For a short spell, Green transferred to Tollington grammar school in Muswell Hill. Panos Eliades, one of his friends there, said that Green never explained the reason for the move. Eliades added, ‘You could see he was going to be a businessman. He was studying stocks and shares and movements, even at an early age. I was interested in chemistry and physics and he was interested in the markets.’ Green left Tollington at sixteen with no O levels.

The question of how this restless and undistinguished young man became a multibillionaire tax exile is the enigma at the heart of this story. His dysfunctional upbringing and the overbearing influence of his mother must have contributed to his aggressiveness and resilience. His failure at school might have given him a chippy determination. But he was also the consummate baby boomer, born at the perfect time to surf the huge wave of post-war borrowing and spending. Green left school in 1968, the year the Beatles released the White Album and women at Ford’s Dagenham plant went on strike for equal pay. Carnaby Street and King’s Road in Chelsea were the twin fashion capitals of the world. Green shot into the business world with an intensity of ambition and energy his teachers at Carmel would have struggled to recognize. Within a year, Alma had arranged a job for him with Rodney Geminder, a family friend who ran a wholesale shoe-importing business in Old Street, east London.

The company was named after Rodney’s father, Martin Geminder. It sourced cheap footwear from China, Hong Kong and Italy and supplied retail chains such as Dolcis. Green later told Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, that he ‘worked in the warehouse, humped the boxes, you know, did everything’. In contrast, a former colleague saw him as ‘a sort of upmarket apprentice, with family connections to the boss’. In a 2016 blog post, Linda Wigzell Cress said her first impression was of a ‘cocky youngster, a bit of a wide boy’ – albeit an ‘extremely well-heeled’ wide boy. Green, then aged seventeen, drove an Opel Rekord Sport, had a ‘mop of curly hair à la Leo Sayer’ and wore ‘expensive, smart and fashionable suits, which perfectly suited his then-slim frame’. Wigzell Cress said he had ‘attractive features’ and was ‘likeable once you got the hang of him’, although he was ‘not too keen on putting his hand in his pocket’ and was always the first to leave the pub, ‘eager to be back at work, not wanting to miss any business. He loved it when the boss and his son were abroad on buying trips, and really lorded it over us then, or at least tried to. But no one could deny he worked hard.’

John Timpson, chairman of the Timpsons key-cutting and shoe-repair chain, was a ladies’ footwear buyer working his way up the family business when he visited Martin Geminder’s Old Street showroom in the late 1960s. ‘I distinctly remember meeting this guy because he made me a cup of tea, which was nice,’ he said. ‘He was straight out of school and quite full of himself. He was clearly someone who thought he was going to go a long way, even at that stage.’ Timpson next came across Green more than two decades later, when Green happened to become the landlord to one of Timpsons’ shops in Ilford, east London. ‘He decided to boot me out, and I needed three or four weeks to find somewhere else,’ Timpson said. ‘The message came back, “Tell John to fuck off.” That’s the way he was, and probably is.’

After four years as a dogsbody, Green was allowed to man one of Martin Geminder’s sale stands at a wholesale exhibition. ‘In those days, they used to set up in hotels,’ he told The Guardian. ‘This was in the Mount Royal Hotel, above the Cumberland … I was standing there and this guy came in and picked up one of our shoes. Well, it was a clog, really, like a Scholl with a bit of a heel and a leather strip over the top. Liked it. How much is it? I said £1.99. What’s the price of 40,000 pairs? I said I’d look into it, belted over to the boss.’ Green pointed out the buyer to Rodney Geminder. ‘No, he said, he’s got long hair, he can’t be serious. I knew the guy came from a big group so I said, right, I’m going to get that order. He bet me £5 that I couldn’t and gave me a deadline. So off I went. They wanted them wrapped in a special way, special box, special this, special that, what didn’t they want? I said yes, yes, I’d see to all that, and the weeks went by and the deadline was coming up, so I’m chasing, chasing, dadadada, and I get the order, on the nail.’ Green said that he ran ‘all the way up the five flights, up to the top of our building, slapped it down, said there’s your order. And he got this old-fashioned leather wallet out of his back pocket, and every note was like it had been ironed. Got the note out, feeling it to make sure it was just the one and handed me the five quid. That was my first order.’ Eight weeks later, the buyer cancelled. Rodney Geminder ‘called me up and said, when you’re passing, call in and give me my fiver back. Still, he trained me up.’

Green was more often on the right side of his early deals, however. While he was learning the shoe trade at Martin Geminder, one of his cousins took a job working in PR for Lotus, the sports car manufacturer. Green begged him to help get hold of a new Lotus Europa, which would usually have involved sitting on a lengthy waiting list. Green’s cousin pulled a few strings with Lotus’s sales director and procured one of the cars. To his amazement and indignation, Green flipped it for a profit a week or two later and never mentioned it again.

In 1973, Rodney Geminder’s apprentice left and struck out on his own. Green dived into the job-buying scene, where a small group of wheeler-dealers picked up excess stock from badly run or bankrupt retail companies and tried to sell it on for a profit to independent shopkeepers or market-stall holders. A job buyer from that era explained, ‘Say somebody imports 10,000 towels but they only sell 8,000? They want to get rid of the other 2,000, so they job ’em out cheap, because they’ve earned the money on the 8,000. Or, say, you could write to Pringle. Now, they might make a jumper but this winter it’s not in fashion. They don’t want it. They sell the jumper for £10 wholesale, but they job it out for £5 or £4.’

Buying ‘parcels’, as the consignments of discounted goods were known, required a gambler’s instinct for what would sell and quick mathematical thinking. The hungrier job buyers also nurtured relationships with the insolvency practitioners who were appointed to liquidate failed companies. Job buying gave Green contacts in the insolvency industry and a lifelong understanding of the ways money could be wrung from the apparently lifeless corpses of retail chains. ‘If you can get into the insolvency agencies, it’s like everything else – it’s the inside track,’ said the job-buying veteran. ‘If you get to know them, they mark your card and say, “This company’s gone skint, do you want to buy this?” The job buyers tended to congregate in Fino’s, a wine bar on Mount Street in Mayfair. They also met in the pubs north of Oxford Street, between Great Portland Street and Great Titchfield Street – a bustling area packed with clothing factories, fabric showrooms and tailors’ shops.

In 1976, Green moved into making and importing garments. He and his mother set up a company called Tarbrook using £9,500 raised through a short-term loan. Tarbrook made a profit of £10,500 on sales of £175,000 in its first eighteen months, but it only ever filed one set of accounts. It was wound down six years later owing creditors £239,350. It had assets of just £436. Green’s mother served as his guardian and mentor as he learned to duck and dive. A family friend who observed them working together in the mid-1970s said that Alma was ‘like a lioness with him’. ‘One of the biggest crimes you could commit then was to dishonour a bill of exchange, and Philip did it regularly,’ he said. ‘When the debt collector came, she was brilliant. She just fended the guy off and wouldn’t let him anywhere near him.’

Green became a familiar figure in the area north of Oxford Street. He was often seen in the showroom of Nathaniel Williams, a wholesaler of printed dress fabrics run by Arnold Crook, a charming merchant whose parents had been market traders in High Wycombe. Crook was proud of his ability to turn around on-trend designs in two or three weeks using textile mills in Germany. He remembered Green as ‘energetic, very hungry, a character’. By the mid-1970s, the economic boom of the 1950s and the pop-inspired optimism of the 1960s were puttering out. It was a time of industrial strife, political instability and soaring inflation. In April 1975, the Wall Street Journal published a famous editorial, ‘Goodbye, Great Britain’, pointing out that 20 per cent inflation, combined with the Labour government’s tax rises, meant the average person would need a pay rise of 40 per cent just to maintain their purchasing power. But Crook, who went on to own the Theatre Royal on Haymarket, said, ‘It didn’t stop the fashion industry. Nothing stops the fashion industry if you’ve got something people want.’ The cast of rag traders coming into his showroom reminded him of ‘something like Guys and Dolls. They were all characters – quick-witted, fast-thinking and exciting. They would compete against one another but it was all friendly.’

On 14 November 1980, Green burst into the public consciousness with a front-page story in Fashion Weekly, one of the industry’s trade magazines. Headlined ‘Mark Down for Mark Up’, it announced the opening of a new shop in Mayfair, 41 Conduit Street, which would sell ‘designer merchandise at almost production-line prices’. It featured a photograph of a frizzy-haired Green smiling next to Viviane Ventura, a brunette actress and socialite who was said to be helping with the shop. Green had bought £35,000 worth of clothes by second-tier brands like Jacques Azagury for about £3,500 from liquidators to Originelle, a small chain that had gone bust that summer. Green told The Guardian that he took delivery of the stock, ‘sent it all to the dry cleaners, got it put on nice satin hangers and polythened it up so it looked brand new’.

Alma was by her son’s side as he opened the store. Fashion Weekly promised there would be ‘startling’ bargains, such as a Bruce Oldfield silk evening dress (usually sold for £285) priced at £99. However, it also reported the brands’ warnings that ‘some of the designs are two or three seasons old and not factory-bought’. Green responded, ‘Designers are living on cloud nine. They work on enormous margins.’ The article gave an early glimpse into Green’s obsession with press coverage. It said the unknown twenty-eight-year-old was ‘already dubbed the Freddie Laker of the rag trade’ – a reference to the boyish entrepreneur who tried to disrupt the air-travel industry by offering £59 flights from London to New York in 1977. Soon afterwards, Green paid £950 at a Sotheby’s auction for a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe and attracted more media attention by displaying it in the window of 41 Conduit Street.

He tried to tap into celebrity culture in a bigger way. In 1979, Gloria Vanderbilt, the American railroad heiress, had achieved remarkable success by putting her name to a pair of super-tight jeans at the age of fifty-four. A year after he opened 41 Conduit Street, Green tried to mimic the idea by persuading Joan Collins to collaborate on a denim range. Collins, who was forty-nine, had recently appeared in two low-budget erotic films, The Stud and The Bitch. She turned out to have less than the requisite star power. Green made the garments in Hong Kong and launched them with bombast. He held a lunch at which Collins cut a chocolate cake in the shape of a pair of jeans. He told the industry magazine Drapers Record there had been £250,000 of orders in the first four weeks and that he aimed to sell 1 million a year at £16.95 a pair. ‘She has an affinity with the customers,’ he said, from an office plastered with Joan Collins press cuttings. The reality turned out to be different. Joan Collins Jeans flopped. The stock had to be liquidated at heavily discounted prices and in 1982 the company was wound up after a creditor, a publisher called Viceroy Press, petitioned for the payment of just £6,666.

Green had another venture up and running on the side. In May 1981, he landed on the front page of Fashion Weekly for a second time, boasting about a designer haul he had sourced from a ‘greatly overstocked’ boutique in Italy. ‘Philip Green has done it again,’ the magazine chirped. ‘Yves Saint Laurent, Georgio Armani [sic], Thierry Mugler, Sonia Rykiel, Christine Dior [sic], Chloe [sic] and Blue Marine [sic] will all be sold at less than half price.’ Green said he had bought 2,500 items with a face value of £330,000. He hinted at plans for a second discount shop. A week later, Fashion Weekly reported, ‘The word in Bond Street is that Lady Rendlesham, just back in the country, is not taking the situation lightly. She holds the Yves Saint Laurent franchise in England.’ Clare Rendlesham, an aristocrat by marriage, was a fearsome former editor of Vogue who was described as ‘thin as a rake and as hard as nails’ by the fashion photographer Helmut Newton. Her solicitor wrote to Green threatening to seek an injunction unless he promised to stop trashing YSL’s brand by discounting it. ‘If Lady Rendlesham wants to sue, we’ll certainly fight her,’ he told the Evening Standard. ‘If the worse comes to the worst, we’ll have to cut the labels out.’ Green won. In June, Fashion Weekly reported that Green ‘reckons Lady Rendlesham … has lost her case to stop him selling cut-price YSL. He now plans to open another womenswear shop and is negotiating with new suppliers. Lady Rendlesham was not available for comment.’

Sure enough, Green launched Bond Street Bandit at number 100 on London’s most prestigious shopping street in September 1981. ‘We have enough customers to keep ten shops going,’ he told the trade press. In June 1982, he announced the opening of another five Bond Street Bandits and a plan to offer the brand to franchisees – news that again made the front page of Fashion Weekly. A few weeks later, however, the magazine told readers it had been ‘too good to be true’. Two of the five new shops had closed within six days of opening. ‘I got the merchandise wrong,’ Green admitted. ‘Stock which sells in London doesn’t sell in Leeds and Bournemouth.’ Fashion Weekly said that Bond Street Bandit’s flagship store on Bond Street was also ‘currently holding a closing-down sale and the company now says the shop will close’. In August, Crocodile, a partner chain that had provided the stores for Bond Street Bandit’s expansion, went into receivership. Green was left out of pocket but said he was owed ‘no great figure’. Beneath the hype, 41 Conduit Street and Bond Street Bandit made very little money. Accounts for Wearstyle, the company set up by Green and his mother to run the businesses, showed profits of just £3,740 on sales of more than £400,000 in the first twenty months. The auditors mentioned that they had been forced ‘to rely upon representations from the directors where alternative confirmation of transactions was not available’.

Most of Green’s early projects were, directly or indirectly, funded by his mother. At twenty-one, he had joined the board of her buy-to-let property company, Langley Road Investments. Alma had a relationship with Bank Leumi of Israel (two Bank Leumi directors happened to live next door to the Greens on Bancroft Avenue). When Green needed to raise money, his mother would allow him to use her properties as collateral for loans from the bank, which he then repaid as quickly as possible. In 1985, Alma helped her son leap into a bigger league. That July, stories appeared in Drapers Record and Men’s Wear magazines about the collapse of a denim brand based in Devon. Bonanza Jeans was run by George Malde, a Kenyan Indian who had moved to London at thirteen and started out selling pre-washed Levi’s from a stall in Kensington market in the days when unwashed 501s were ‘like cardboard’. Bonanza had borrowed £4.5 million from Johnson Matthey bank, which had gone on a risky lending spree to compensate for falling profits in its gold trading division. Johnson Matthey went bust in 1984. Receivers from PricewaterhouseCoopers combed through its loan book and called in debts owed by clients, including Bonanza. The jeans brand was unable to find the money.

A desperate Malde was introduced to Green as his potential saviour by Kenny Tibber, a job buyer. Green summoned Malde for breakfast at Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane. As Malde began to explain his problem, a waiter spilled scrambled eggs on his suit. Green demanded to see the manager and bellowed at him until he promised Malde a new suit from Savile Row and £500 compensation. ‘From that day on, I thought he was a great man,’ Malde said. ‘Very forceful. Quite rude to some people. Within two hours I could see that he could really get things done.’ They agreed that Green would buy Bonanza from the receivers and run it in partnership with Malde. To fund the purchase, Green negotiated a loan of up to £2 million from Bank Leumi, secured against some of Alma’s rental properties. He knew Malde had 400,000 pairs of jeans in a warehouse and millions of pounds of debts that could be collected from retail customers, so Bonanza was potentially worth a lot more than the amount he planned to offer PwC. The next day, Green chartered a helicopter and flew to Bristol with a banker and a lawyer to close the deal. According to Malde, the Bank Leumi man was carrying £2 million of cash and bankers’ drafts in a briefcase – and a gun for security. Green had cleverly asked the banker to make out most of the drafts in amounts of £50,000 so that he could haggle.

Malde sat in a separate room in PwC’s Bristol office while Green rammed the deal home with two of the accountancy firm’s partners. Finally, at 5 a.m., they agreed a price of £1.1 million – almost half the maximum £2 million Green had been willing to pay, and a fraction of the £4.5 million Johnson Matthey had lent Bonanza. Green recounted to The Guardian how he was unable to fly back to London because the helicopter would have been ‘too noisy that time of the morning. Middle of nowhere, pitch black, police car comes by, gives us a lift to the station, quick kip on a bench, caught the milk train back to London. Monday morning we’re up and running.’

As part of their arrangement, Malde had urged Green to arrange for his release from a personal guarantee he had given to the bank, ‘but in all the negotiations he forgot about me, basically’. Green’s oversight meant that PwC pursued Malde for the outstanding £3.4 million debt and made him bankrupt, taking his five-bedroom detached house in Harrow. Malde was ‘upset’, but Green offered him a deal. ‘He said look, we’re 50:50 in the new company unofficially, and whatever we make we’ll share 50:50,’ Malde said. ‘We straight away went and collected all our debts and we got £2 million back in the company within three months. He was very good at collecting debts, I must say. Bloody hell.’ Green repaid Bank Leumi’s £1.1 million within a month and Malde soon had enough money to buy a new house in Knightsbridge. ‘Philip said don’t worry, I’ll sort you out,’ Malde said. ‘And to be fair, he did.’

Green took out bullish ads in trade magazines to announce that ‘business is back to normal at Bonanza’. Chris Astridge, the owner of MAB News, took a dim view of people using insolvencies to shed liabilities and buy businesses back. In September 1985, he mocked Bonanza with a spoof ad for Pond-é-Rosa Jeans – a play on the TV series Bonanza, which was set on the fictional Ponderosa ranch in the Sierra Nevada. ‘Back in the market after the most spectacular financial disaster yet!’ it said. ‘Yes, we’re back! After going bust last week for a mere £3 million and leaving all our suppliers, customers and bankers up the creek, we’ve secured another mug to back us with as much money as we can squeeze out of him.’ It ran in a special edition of MAB News produced for a jeans trade fair at Earls Court. Astridge was setting up the MAB stand when Green thundered over, accompanied by two henchmen. ‘Did you write that story about me?’ he demanded. ‘If you do that again, I’ll take your kneecaps off.’

Green introduced Malde to a new way of working. Suppliers were routinely called into his office on Great Portland Street to be roasted. ‘Some of them would leave crying, some would leave giving him a 50 per cent discount,’ Malde said. ‘He didn’t take any nonsense from any suppliers.’ After a brutal twelve-hour day, Bonanza’s new owner would be chauffeur-driven to the Ritz casino in his Bentley. ‘We’d have dinner there and he would gamble on the tables,’ Malde said. ‘He played either blackjack or roulette. They would close the table down and he was the only guy allowed to play. He had power, and all the girls would be impressed. There’d be loads of champagne, caviar, free food – whatever he wanted. On the roulette, he would only play number five and the corners around five. When he won, he won loads. When he lost, he lost loads. He’d thump the table and everybody would be watching him.’

Sometimes, Green’s temper burst out at unexpected moments. Malde remembered flying first-class with his new partner from London to Rio de Janeiro via Geneva for supplier meetings in the days before there were direct flights from London. Green started off calling the German passengers on the plane ‘Nazis’. Then, when the Swissair steward came down the aisle with food, Green shouted ‘This is crap! You have it back!’ and threw it over him. ‘That’s the thing I remember,’ Malde said. ‘The steward upsetting him and – boom!’ Some of Bonanza’s junior staff were less amused than Malde by Green’s behaviour. A sales rep who was persuaded to join the company after Green took over said, ‘He was a fucking pig – just tyrannical. He didn’t want to hear anything you had to tell him anyway. He was effing and blinding at me one day and I just walked out, and that was the end of that.’

One of the suppliers Green and Malde chased to recover a debt was Jean Jeanie, which ran a chain of shops and owned the brand FU’s Jeans. Jean Jeanie owed Bonanza £250,000. Green coerced ten postdated cheques for £25,000 each from its reluctant boss, Grant Casey. On the way out, Casey said that he wished he could get rid of his business. Intrigued, Green went to see him for a Chinese meal the next day in Slough, where Jean Jeanie was based.

Casey said he wanted £4 million. A few days’ investigation revealed that Jean Jeanie was losing £70,000 a week. Green called Casey. ‘The good news is I’ll buy it,’ he said. ‘The bad news is you’re broke.’ Green told The Guardian he offered Casey £65,000 upfront, plus a further £435,000 ‘if I get round the bend in six months’. Casey accepted. In the era before H&M and Zara, the acquisition of Jean Jeanie and its sixty-five stores turned Green into one of the most powerful players in the denim industry. He wrestled it back into profit and in February 1986, less than six months after the deal, Lee Cooper Jeans offered to buy the combined group. Green asked for £10 million on the basis that ‘I don’t want to sell, so if you pay me what it’s not worth I’ll sell it.’ The two sides settled on £7 million, with half to be deferred as a performance bonus. According to Malde, at that point Green forgot about their 50:50 arrangement. Malde said he received £750,000, with Casey and Kenny Tibber getting £1 million each. He estimated that Green personally banked ‘between £4 million and £5m’. (Press reports at the time suggested it was closer to £3 million.) ‘I did probably say to him I deserved a bit more,’ Malde said, although he added, ‘I was happy, to be honest with you. I had a new life and I was OK.’

Green signed a three-year contract to stay on at Lee Cooper. He garnered glowing write-ups in the trade press under headlines such as ‘Green Genie?’ and ‘Stroke of Jeanius’. ‘At the end of the day, there is no great mystique about retailing,’ Green told Men’s Wear magazine in one of the interviews. ‘It’s all about logic and common sense, and yet those are the two virtues that it is hardest to find these days.’ But the honeymoon proved short lived. Green had a bust-up with his new boss, an urbane Frenchman called Pierre Pouillot, and in September 1987 Fashion Weekly reported that he had been ‘edged out’. The magazine said that Green was refusing to comment ‘until I have seen my lawyers’. After his exit, Lee Cooper, which was renamed Vivat, suffered severe indigestion from Bonanza and Jean Jeanie. The chairman, Lord Marsh, resigned in 1988 and the company booked a £12.7 million loss in 1989 – although to be fair it had plenty of problems other than Bonanza and Jean Jeanie. Green was later keen to present his departure as his own decision. A year after he left, he forced an apology from Fashion Weekly for suggesting that he was sacked. In 2006, he told the BBC’s Robert Peston, ‘In the end, one of my funny moments, left there, forfeited six million quid – had a contract for an earn-out and I just thought, “Fuck it.” ’

When he first met Malde in 1985, Green was a conspicuously wealthy thirtysomething with an expanding waistline and Spandau Ballet hair. A well-known figure on the London party circuit, Green had been seen with a number of attractive women on his arm. His past girlfriends included Juliette Owide, daughter of the Soho lap-dancing club owner Oscar Owide, and Viviane Ventura, the aspiring actress who was involved in 41 Conduit Street. According to Malde, at the time of their acquaintance, Green was dating Vimla Lalvani, a Hawaiian-Indian yoga guru. Vimla had just divorced from Gulu Lalvani, the Pakistani electronics tycoon who co-founded the Binatone telephone empire and was said to have given Alan Sugar his first break in business. ‘Vimla and Philip were together for about three years,’ Malde said. ‘We went out for dinner, they slept together, they stayed together. She was obviously divorced from this other guy and she wouldn’t marry Philip, and this was the girl Philip wanted to marry.’ Malde described Lalvani as ‘the love of Philip’s life … He was very, very keen. He was in love with her, but it just didn’t happen.’ Lalvani, whose students included Jerry Hall and Olivia Newton-John, confirmed that she had been in a relationship with Green in the mid-1980s, but declined to comment further.

Malde said that when Lalvani ‘rejected him and wouldn’t marry him, Tina came onto the scene’. Tina Palos was born in 1949 as Cristina Stuart Paine, the daughter of a successful wine merchant. Her birth certificate gave the family’s address as a house on Oxford Square, north of Hyde Park, although in a 2014 interview with the Sunday Times, she said her father’s work took the family to Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand for long spells. At seventeen, Tina Paine met a South African jazz drummer in Hong Kong, Robert Palos. He was ‘fourteen years older than me, 6ft 2in and divine’. They married in South Africa in 1967, a year after meeting. The couple opened a clothes shop in Johannesburg and had two children, Stasha and Brett. Tina was a party girl: Stasha later said that her mother was the first female DJ in Johannesburg and a go-go dancer who performed with the Beach Boys. In 1978, when Stasha was six and Brett was four, the family moved to London and Robert and Tina opened Harabels, a fashion boutique in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge. By the time she met Green, Tina was about to divorce from Palos, although she kept his surname and continued to run the shop.

Like Alma, Tina was a petite, tough blonde who knew how to get her own way. Like Philip, she had lost her father (Stuart Marshall Paine died of a haemorrhage caused by a chronic ulcer in 1983, when his elder daughter was thirty-three). In Tina’s version of the story, they were introduced by mutual friends in 1985, although she said the relationship took a while to develop. ‘I thought he was dreadful, actually,’ she told the Daily Mail in 2005. ‘I remember him asking me who I was. I said I ran a boutique called Harabels and he said, rather dismissively, “Well, I’ve never heard of it.” I thought, what an arrogant pig.’ Tina said they saw each other the next evening at a friend’s flat before a party. ‘His bow tie was crooked and without thinking I went right up to him and straightened it. And that was it. It was the oddest thing. I thought, I’m in trouble here. I just fell in love with him at that moment.’

Malde remembered the genesis of the romance differently. He thought Alma had introduced Tina to her son, having got to know the younger woman by popping into Harabels to browse. ‘His mother had gone in the shop – that’s how they met,’ he said. Trading at Harabels was becoming difficult, and Tina was in need of money and support. Malde said, ‘They met and then he didn’t want to date Tina. I was spending sixteen hours with Philip every day, and I know Tina would chase him, he wasn’t chasing Tina … Tina was a bit like Philip – what she wanted, she tried very hard to get. She wanted Philip and she tried every which way to get him. In the end, I know the reason they got married was because she was pregnant.’

In her Sunday Times interview, Tina said it took them a while to make their relationship ‘official’. ‘I said to him, “Look, I will only tell everyone you are my boyfriend when I feel we can all handle it,” ’ she recounted. She moved into his house at 55 Avenue Road, St John’s Wood – an address that featured Philip’s lucky number twice. Some of Philip’s relatives thought he began to change as Tina encouraged an appetite for celebrity and luxury goods. ‘Unwrapping gifts under the tree in St John’s Wood, it would be Hèrmes scarves, this, that and the other,’ said one. ‘He wouldn’t know a Hèrmes scarf from a bar of soap.’

The two were soon inseparable, although Philip still refused to commit for as long as possible. Tina told the Mail the final straw came when she waved him off one morning in her dressing gown as he got into his Bentley. A newspaper ran a headline like ‘Tycoon’s Gal Waves Him Off’. ‘I thought, I’m nobody’s “gal”,’ she said. Tina proposed to Philip and ran off to Marbella until he said yes. They married on 13 September 1990 at Westminster register office, when he was thirty-eight and she was forty-one. Tina was already pregnant with their first child, Chloe. The simple ceremony was followed by a reception at the house on Avenue Road, where they served dinner for a hundred guests. Edwin Starr, the Motown singer famous for his hit ‘War’, performed live in the garden. Philip and Tina Green posed for photographs holding doves on their fingertips. From the look on their faces, they knew they were on the cusp of a remarkable journey.