6.

Dreams Come True

Project Centipede was at an embryonic stage when an unhelpful story appeared in The Times. ‘Bugger!’ Paul McGowan typed to a colleague. ‘We need to move fast … Get some rest.’

McGowan was an insolvency expert with an impish face and a sharp glint to his eye. He had been tracking one of the retail industry’s wounded beasts through the early Christmas trading season (for some reason, he chose Project Centipede as the vaguely comical codename for his hunting expedition). It was December 2004, and Allders was on its last legs. After his unhappy departure from BHS, Terry Green had gone across to run the careworn department store. Allders resembled Grace Brothers from the sitcom Are You Being Served? Terry Green’s original plan had been to merge Allders with House of Fraser. When that failed, he had attempted to take the group upmarket by bringing in Debenhams-inspired designer collaborations. That had flopped, and Lehman Brothers, the company’s main lender, had warned of its intention to call in its loans. Allders had until the New Year to find a saviour or face going bust. One of McGowan’s colleagues, Robert Schneiderman, remarked in an email, ‘It is very much the talk of the town.’

On 8 December, its owner announced an emergency auction. The statement irritated McGowan. The Northern Irishman and his business partner, Paul Taylor, ran Hilco, a small fund set up to take over struggling retail businesses – and to liquidate them if that turned out to be the most profitable route. The advent of Hilco pointed to an emerging trend. Having survived for years despite offering unremarkable products and service, older high-street chains were beginning to feel the internet nibbling at their sales. McGowan had been planning to gain control of Allders by buying its debt from Lehman. He worried that the news might alert other predators. It did – although it actually worked in McGowan’s favour. One billionaire in particular took a liking to the deal but chose to hide his involvement by using Hilco as a front.

Philip Green negotiated the purchase of Lehman’s £90 million debt for less than £30 million from Jeremy Isaacs, the American bank’s European chief executive. Project Centipede came to fruition on 19 January 2005. Minerva, the property company that owned Allders, announced to the stock market that Lehman’s loans had been sold to Epsilon Investments, a mysterious company based on the island of Nevis in the West Indies. Epsilon was said to be working with Hilco. Green liked to refer to the people who fronted his financial interests as his ‘jockeys’. McGowan was the jockey who would ride Allders towards its highly profitable collapse.

Andrew Rosenfeld, Minerva’s cigar-chewing boss, felt betrayed by Lehman. He made sure the statement included a pointed reference to the Monaco domicile of Epsilon’s directors. Rosenfeld also authorized his PR man to brief journalists off the record that Green was the force behind Epsilon. Green denied any involvement. Someone who dealt with him on Allders watched him repeatedly take calls from the press, lie and hang up, chuckling, ‘They’ll write whatever I tell them to.’ When Green found out who was behind the briefings, he called Rosenfeld’s PR man and warned him, ‘You’ve landed the first punch, but believe me, when I punch you back, you’ll feel it a lot more. I’ll have my lawyers onto you.’

The speculation died away. Green and Hilco spent a further £45 million buying loans Barclays had made to Allders, then pushed the business into administration. Hilco appointed the insolvency division of Kroll, the investigations agency, which in turn employed Hilco as a paid adviser. Someone who worked with them described the way Green controlled the administration and brutalized McGowan, who was himself hardly a soft character. Green would shout, ‘Paul, you’re not fucking listening, otherwise you wouldn’t have asked that fucking stupid question!’ Allders was a classic smash-and-grab. Through BHS, Green bought the ten best sites from Allders’ portfolio of forty-five stores. A further fourteen were sold to rivals including Debenhams and Primark. Most of the others were shut, with the loss of at least 2,000 jobs. The flagship Allders in Croydon was sold to Green’s friend Harold Tillman, with Hilco and Terry Green also taking stakes. The disposals were overseen by Malcolm Dalgleish, one of Green’s closest allies in the property industry. Dalgleish, a wily, self-made agent from Wandsworth Common in south London, had first worked with Green on the dismantling of Sears, helping to sell off its £300 million property portfolio.

The proceeds of the administration went tax free to Nevis, then on to Green and Hilco. Within a few months, the 143-year-old company had all but disappeared. Having put £75 million at risk, the raiders roughly doubled their money. Allders’ pensioners fared less well. There were 3,000 members of its scheme, which had a shortfall of £68 million. It had to be bailed out by the Pension Protection Fund, a recently created insurance programme, resulting in benefits cuts for 2,400 people. The Pensions Regulator tried to pursue Minerva, Allders’ former owner, but abandoned the case fourteen months later. Perhaps the incident stuck in Green’s memory.

When I asked the tycoon about Allders in 2016, he continued to deny his involvement. ‘I had nothing to do with Allders, at all, ever,’ he said. With an almost audible smirk, Green added, ‘I don’t even know the name of the company. Epsilon what?’ McGowan’s response was similarly unhelpful. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘You’re trying to build this big bloody conspiracy and you are so barking up the wrong fucking tree.’ However, one of the many well-placed sources who confirmed the details of the deal gave me a copy of the draft contract for Epsilon’s purchase of Lehman’s £90 million debt. The signatory was one Philip Green.

Six years earlier, Green had been happy to boast about his lucrative demolition of Sears. His strange coyness over Allders might have reflected a growing desire to protect his celebrity status. It might also have reflected a growing desire for a knighthood. Green had first shown an interest in politics in October 2003, when he attended a Breast Cancer Care charity auction and bid £18,000 for a game of tennis with Tony Blair at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. Richard Caring, his business partner, was reported to have tagged along for the match. With his bouffant hair, high-wattage grin and £15 million house in Hampstead nicknamed the Palace of Versailles, Caring was far from the typical Labour sympathizer. Yet he came to play a significant and controversial role in the party’s financing three years later.

In June 2004, Green donated £4.25 million to Jewish Care, a health and social services charity. He topped that in 2007 with a gift of £5 million, to be given in five annual tranches of £1 million. Jewish Care’s president was Lord Levy, the master fundraiser known to his more cynical colleagues as Lord Cashpoint. Levy, who was among the guests at Brandon Green’s extravagant bar mitzvah weekend in 2005, was a tough accountant-turned-music-industry entrepreneur. He had made £10 million in 1988 from the sale of Magnet Records, the label he co-founded. After helping to raise £15 million for New Labour’s first election campaign, he had been installed in the House of Lords by Blair in 1997. Levy was known to be the most direct route to the prime minister’s heart for the wealthy. Visitors to his home in Totteridge, which had its own tennis court and swimming pool, would mingle with key figures from Blair’s inner circle, such as Tessa Jowell and Jonathan Powell. They would rarely leave without opening their chequebooks. Levy would make clear that generous donors to his charities could occasionally expect letters of recommendation for honours – although, of course, there was never any guarantee of a knighthood or peerage.

Labour had overhauled the political funding system in 2001, requiring parties to name donors giving more than £5,000 following a row over a £1 million payment from the Formula One tycoon Bernie Ecclestone. In September 2004, under pressure from Gordon Brown, Blair announced that he would serve only one more term. The prospect of Blair’s political mortality, combined with the longer-running issue of transparency, slowed Labour’s donations to a drip. Lord Levy calmly suggested a solution. He said that Labour could deploy its own version of a trick used by the Tories: solicit loans rather than gifts to get around the disclosure rules. Blair approved the idea, and Labour secretly raised almost £14 million from twelve businessmen to fight the 2005 election. The prime minister came a cropper when he proposed four of the lenders for peerages. One was Sir David Garrard, the former chairman of Minerva, who had lent Labour £2.3 million. The peerages committee raised concerns over the collapse of Allders and the fate of its pensioners under his stewardship. Another was Chai Patel, a care-homes owner, who had lent £1.5 million. The Liberal Democrat front-bencher Vince Cable wrote to the panel questioning Patel’s suitability (there had been allegations of poor standards in one of his homes in south-west London, although he was cleared of wrongdoing in a judicial review of the case).

When he was turned down for a seat in the House of Lords, a furious Patel spoke to the Sunday Times, which exposed the scandal. Richard Caring was revealed to be among the twelve businessmen who had provided loans. He had lent Labour £2 million. Caring was known to be close to Levy, and was sometimes described as his tennis partner. In 2005, Caring had raised £10 million at a lavish ball in St Petersburg for the NSPCC, one of Levy’s charities. The guests included Bill Clinton and Liz Hurley. Elton John performed. Blair filmed a message of support for the event. Barry Townsley, a stockbroker who was on the board of several Caring companies, had also lent Labour £1 million, and was one of the four businessmen put forward for peerages.

Lord Levy was arrested twice in the ensuing police investigation into cash for honours. Blair was questioned three times. Almost eighteen months after the story broke, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that it had insufficient evidence to bring charges and dropped the case. Labour repaid all the loans, and none of the four proposed by Blair entered the Lords.

That was the backdrop to the government’s surprising decision to knight Philip Green. It was a time when money and politics mingled giddily. After Lord Levy, the next most direct route to Blair’s heart was to build a city academy. In 2006, Des Smith, a council member of the trust that recruited sponsors for academies, told an undercover Sunday Times reporter that funding the prime minister’s favourite type of school made an honour ‘a certainty’. In September 2004, three months after his first Jewish Care donation, Green unveiled plans to build a vocational college for the retail industry. The Fashion Retail Academy opened near Tottenham Court Road in October 2006, offering one- or two-year diplomas for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds. Green’s Arcadia Group invested £5 million. Other retailers, including Marks & Spencer and Tesco, put in £6 million. The government provided £10 million. At the ceremony to celebrate the arrival of the first 220 students, Blair awkwardly picked out a pair of women’s shoes to go with grey shorts and a woollen jumper. Green joked, ‘You could have missed your vocation in life.’ Blair replied, ‘You would have to start me right at the bottom.’ As usual with Green, there was a kink that ensured his family had a stake. The academy’s building on Gresse Street was owned not by the college but by Tina through Taveta Investments, Arcadia’s holding company. In the decade after 2006, the property soared in value from £12.5 million to £41.5 million, helped by a refurbishment in 2015 that was partially funded by a one-off grant of £544,000 from the Greater London Authority. The property’s appreciation accrued to Green’s family, not the academy.

Philip Green was knighted for services to retail on 17 June 2006, less than eighteen months after his break-up of Allders. Next to him on the front page of the Financial Times was another Monaco-based tycoon, the easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou. Jack Dromey, Labour’s treasurer, later said the party had been keen to present itself as pro-enterprise as well as pro-worker, which was ‘legitimate’. But he added of Green, ‘Were we quite as discriminating as we should have been? In the zeal to become the party of business, it was too embracing.’fn1

By the time the Fashion Retail Academy opened its doors, the economy was hurtling upwards on a steep trajectory. Prices of assets were booming, from property and shares to fine wine. Green was among a crowd of dealmakers who clustered around the honey pot of Halifax Bank of Scotland. HBOS’s head of corporate lending, Peter Cummings, was a mild-mannered banker from Dumbarton who had started his career as a tea boy, but he was willing to risk huge amounts of debt and equity on high-profile deals sourced by entrepreneurs who put in little money of their own. Like Green, Cummings was particularly drawn to companies whose value appeared to be underpinned by property. The banker went on a spree after his stunning early experience with Arcadia, where he received a £96 million dividend for investing £800,000 of the bank’s equity alongside £808 million of debt, which was repaid in a flash.

Cummings backed Tom Hunter’s failed takeover bid for Selfridges in 2003, followed by his successful moves on Wyevale Garden Centres, House of Fraser, the retirement homes group McCarthy & Stone and the housebuilder Crest Nicholson between 2006 and 2007. Cummings also financed the Icelandic fund Baugur, which partnered with Hunter on House of Fraser, and Robert Tchenguiz, an Iranian-born playboy with pink-tinted glasses. He liked to reassure HBOS’s investors, ‘I just make sure I don’t lend to idiots.’ In 2007, Cummings earned a total of £2.6 million – more than his youthful chief executive, Andy Hornby. Green was one of Cummings’ top clients. An internal HBOS briefing note drawn up by two of his managers in October 2006 said, ‘The Sir Philip Green connection has been highly remunerative for the bank in recent years with significant dividends paid to us … Our relationship with the executive team is strong and further banking opportunities are likely to arise for the bank from this source.’ The following summer, Green had dinner with Paul Myners, M&S’s chairman, at Scott’s in Mayfair. The evening was supposed to have been a peace summit between Green and Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, brokered by Myners after both he and Green bid for an audience with the newspaper boss at a charity auction. But it had gone badly, and Dacre had left early. As they smoked cigars outside the restaurant, Green boasted to Myners, ‘I could call Peter Cummings now and have a term sheet for £1 billion tomorrow morning.’

Yet Green was less reckless than his public image suggested. ‘There is a difference between risk and calculated risk,’ he liked to say. After his second attempt to buy M&S, he pulled back from big acquisitions and kept debt levels at BHS and Arcadia low. The swashbuckling days were coming to an end, but he was still plugged into every deal on the high street through his network of contacts. An adviser who worked with him said, ‘It was a moment when it was just things happening all the time. It was really quite exciting. Everything that came into play, he was involved with in some way or another, or people came to him for advice.’ Green’s access to information and willingness to leak stories about his friends made him the perfect contact for a generation of journalists, who competed for his favour.

By the summer of 2007, the economy was overheating dangerously. Hubris was in evidence. Baugur installed a ten-foot-tall statue of a Viking with a rock guitar strapped to his back in the lobby of its office on Bond Street. In May, Jón ásgeir Jóhannesson flew 300 contacts to Monaco for an event called ‘Baugur Day’. After a series of financial presentations, there was a black-tie dinner. Jonathan Ross, the compère, welcomed the crowd to ‘the glittering heart of Europe’s tax-evasion district’. Green appeared on stage as a judge in a live production of The X Factor alongside Louis Walsh, Sharon Osborne and Simon Cowell. Baugur screened a bespoke episode of Little Britain where Matt Lucas’s character hypnotized Jóhannesson. The evening culminated in a live performance from Tina Turner, who was backed by a full orchestra. Two months later, Sir Tom Hunter, who had been knighted in 2005 for services to philanthropy, gave an interview to the BBC’s Robert Peston in the garden of his mansion in the south of France. He pledged to give away £1 billion to charity.

It was a remarkable promise for a remarkable time, but it didn’t last. The seven-year boom had been driven by a fantasy combination of cheap debt and rising asset prices. A fortnight after Hunter’s BBC interview, the first thunder cracks of reality broke across the Atlantic. Two hedge funds run by the investment bank Bear Stearns collapsed. They had invested heavily in American mortgage-backed securities. It was the first sign of trouble emerging from the sub-prime market, where banks extended money to homebuyers with poor credit ratings, then sliced and diced the loans into complicated financial instruments and traded them on Wall Street. The storm moved across to Britain in September 2007, when a request to the Bank of England for emergency funding sparked a run on Northern Rock. By the end of 2008, the landscape was unrecognizable. HBOS had merged with Lloyds Bank and the enlarged group had been partially nationalized – as had Royal Bank of Scotland. Iceland had become the first European country to receive an International Monetary Fund bailout since 1976. Britain was in the deepest recession since the Second World War. The party was over.

Hunter and Robbie Tchenguiz both saw their £1 billion fortunes wiped out as their investments plunged in value. Hunter said, with gallows humour, ‘I did want to give my money away – I just didn’t expect it to be in quite this way.’ Peter Cummings was fired from HBOS and turned into one of the villains of the crisis, along with Sir Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, the boss of RBS, who was stripped of his knighthood four years later. Green, who had resisted the headiest temptations of the debt-fuelled years, weathered the hurricane in a position to play godfather to his broken associates. In October 2008, a month after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Green flew to Iceland to negotiate the purchase of Baugur’s bank loans. He humiliated the Icelandic lenders by offering as little as 10 per cent of their face value, and the talks broke down. When Baugur was put into administration the following February, Jón ásgeir Jóhannesson predicted that Green would be ‘dancing a war dance in his living room’. But the tycoon did not scoop up any of Baugur’s retail collection, which ranged from the fashion chains Coast, Karen Millen, Oasis and Warehouse to the Hamleys toy emporium.

When Peter Cummings became the only HBOS employee to be subjected to an investigation by the Financial Services Authority, Green put him in touch with a PR man, Neil Bennett, former City editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Cummings was given a lifetime ban by the regulator. He denounced ‘an extraordinary Orwellian process by an organization that acts as lawmaker, judge, jury, appeal court and executioner’. Lord Stevenson, Cummings’ former chairman, sent Green a case of first-growth Bordeaux wines from 1961 and 1982 as a thankyou for helping the banker find PR support. He never heard anything in reply.

The king of the high street was increasingly preoccupied with other interests. Green was jabbing his fingers into as many pies as possible, and retail was just the start of it. He had dabbled in football since 1987, when he persuaded the Tottenham Hotspur chairman Irving Scholar to put his friend Tony Berry on the board. In 1991, he helped Terry Venables raise the money for his ill-fated purchase of a stake in Spurs, and in 1999 he underwrote the West End theatre producer Bill Kenwright’s takeover of Everton. Green later told The Observer he had written ‘a £30 million letter’ to help Kenwright secure debt from Bank of Scotland because ‘I liked him’. In 2002, he brokered the transfer of the Leeds United defender Rio Ferdinand to Manchester United. (Terry Venables was the manager of Leeds at the time. Allan Leighton, BHS’s chairman, was deputy chairman, and Richard North, who knew Green from his first M&S approach, was also a non-executive.) In 2004, Green intervened in talks between Fulham’s owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed, and Manchester United’s chief executive, David Gill, clearing the way for the striker Louis Saha’s transfer to Old Trafford. Football’s dealmaking appealed to his trader’s instincts, and he loved the reflected glamour and power.

A financier who attended an intimate charity dinner hosted by Sir Alex Ferguson, then manager of Manchester United, and Harry Redknapp, then manager of Spurs, at Searcys private dining rooms in Knightsbridge in January 2012 described how Green dominated the conversation. He had been invited by the Goldman Sachs banker Mike Sherwood, who had paid for the evening alongside Manjit Dale, co-founder of the private equity firm TDR Capital. ‘Everything Ferguson said, Philip was like, “Oh, I did that deal, I financed that deal,” ’ the guest said. ‘He gave the impression he had been the cashpoint. He made it clear he was at least partly the power behind Tottenham. Harry was very scared of him. There were times when I expected Ferguson to give him a slap, but he didn’t. He seemed slightly nervous as well.’

In December 2016, Chris Matheson, the Labour MP for Chester – and an Everton season-ticket holder – used a select committee interview with the chairman of the Football Association, Greg Clarke, to raise the question of Green’s influence over the sport. Matheson suggested that Green had played ‘something of a role as a shadow director at Everton’. In 2004, Green had organized a £15 million credit line when Everton’s finances came under strain, and in 2006 he arranged the sale of a 23 per cent stake in the club to his friend Robert Earl, the founder of Planet Hollywood, who invested through a company in the British Virgin Islands called BCR Sports. When Earl sold the shareholding in 2016 to Farhad Moshiri, a Monaco-based businessman, bankers wondered whether Green was in fact the true owner of BCR Sports.

Simon Cowell, the sharp-tongued creator of The X Factor, provided another distraction. Green had first met Cowell at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1999, and the boyishly vain pop promoter had been among the guests at PG55. As he acquired a taste for celebrity through Topshop, Green appointed himself Cowell’s superagent, flying around the world for free to negotiate deals on his behalf, including the formation of a joint venture with Sony for the rights to The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. In October 2009, Tina paid Banana Split £3 million to stage Cowell’s fiftieth birthday party at Wrotham Park, an eighteenth-century mansion in Hertfordshire. Cowell’s face was projected onto the outside of the building. The 450 guests were greeted by waiters wearing Cowell masks and top hats. The dining marquee was decorated as a boudoir, with blue satin curtains on the walls and gold and silver on the curved tables. On the ceiling was a replica of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel, with the image of God replaced by Cowell. There was a live performance from Earth, Wind & Fire, the Greens’ favourite band, and a burlesque show from The Box in New York featuring dancers dressed as giant vaginas. Green, who was in his element as he swaggered around greeting guests, leered to one, ‘Dreams really do come true, don’t they?’

Four months earlier, Green and Cowell had announced plans to build a multibillion-pound showbiz and merchandising company to rival Disney. Through poor business planning, Cowell had allowed the rights to the shows he produced so obsessively – The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent – to be owned by third parties including Sony. Green wanted to take them back, launch new formats and sell clothes based on the acts they discovered. The venture was hyped as the ultimate collaboration between the creator of One Direction and the billionaire boss of Topshop. Kate Moss was lined up as style director. However, Green’s rambunctious approach irritated Cowell’s negotiating partners in Hollywood, and when Syco Entertainment finally emerged, it was in the form of a 50:50 joint venture between Cowell and Sony. Green was relegated to the role of adviser. His vision of a showbiz empire quietly faded.

By 2010, Green was one of the few people who could claim to straddle the worlds of business, entertainment, sport and politics. He even boasted of having helped London win its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, dialling the ambassador Lord Coe and putting him on speakerphone to convince incredulous journalists. Having ridden the New Labour wave, he switched his allegiances to David Cameron, the forty-three-year-old Conservative leader, a fortnight before the general election in May. Cameron unconvincingly ousted Gordon Brown in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Three months later, he appointed Green to review public sector efficiency – to the rumoured chagrin of senior colleagues such as Francis Maude, the cabinet office minister.

There was an immediate backlash as Labour pointed out that Green’s wife lived in Monaco, and stories resurfaced about his extravagant birthday parties. Green angrily told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, ‘My wife is not a tax exile. My family do not live in the United Kingdom – it’s somewhat different.’ David Crow, a reporter at the free business daily City AM, was among those who challenged the Arcadia boss on his tax affairs. Green called him a ‘fucking tosser’. Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary, told City AM, ‘There’s a lot I could say on this, but I’d better miss this one out.’ Green responded, ‘What difference does it make if I live on the moon? The real question is whether I’m qualified to do the job.’

Green refused to produce a proper report. In October 2010, he delivered a thirty-three-page PowerPoint presentation to the Cabinet Office suggesting the government centralize procurement of basic materials like paper and printing cartridges and use more videoconferencing to cut down on hotel bills. Green told the BBC’s Robert Peston that ‘the lights would be out’ if he ran his retail businesses with the level of data the government had. Green’s review went nowhere, and it was tacitly shelved. Meanwhile, UK Uncut, a campaign group set up to protest against the Tories’ austerity programme, targeted Green’s stores, staging a sit-in at the flagship Topshop on Oxford Street and glueing themselves to the windows in Brighton. Green later complained that he had tried to contribute to the public debate but had ‘got my windows broken’.

The powerful image Arcadia’s owner presented to the outside world through his catholic range of interests belied a dysfunctional family life. Sir Philip Green and his sister, Elizabeth, had continued their childhood feud into adulthood. While he pursued material wealth, she trained as a teacher, then ran off to live in an ashram in India. She eventually settled in north London and married a graphic designer, David Neville, with whom she had three children – Simon, Jacob and Georgia. Green’s antipathy towards his sister extended to her offspring. Simon, his eldest nephew, became a journalist who happened to cover retail for the Evening Standard. In November 2013, Green hosted his annual Arcadia results breakfast at the Langham hotel. I sat next to him and watched with grim fascination as he cut a huge slab of blue cheese, pinned it to a hunk of French bread and shovelled it into his mouth, washing the combination down with gulps of black coffee. A few weeks earlier, a rumour had gone around the assembled press pack that Green had helped Neville buy a house in Brixton. With his sixth sense for weakness, Green must have known. As his nephew rushed out of the room to meet the Standard’s early print deadline, Green called out in a loud voice, ‘If you don’t write something nice, I’ll take the fucking house back.’

But in October 2007, Green and his sister put on a rare display of solidarity. The tycoon threw a ninetieth birthday party for their mother at the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane (although he belatedly realized it was actually her eighty-ninth). Alma still exercised a powerful hold over her son. She was one of the few people who could criticize him. She would also mock Tina, sometimes remarking of her garish choice of clothes, ‘Ooh, Tina – I remember when that was in fashion!’

A long queue of shiny cars disgorged guests including Richard Caring and his then wife Jackie, the former Sunday Times business editor Will Lewis and the Goldman Sachs banker Mike Sherwood. Some of the Greens’ relatives had flown over from Canada. Tina, wearing a black dress and dripping with sparkling diamonds, led Alma into the champagne reception to a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’. After the crowd had taken their seats in the candle-lit dining room, Green gave a speech to the woman who had dominated his life. Alma looked on impassively, her blonde hair in a neat bob. ‘I was very, very lucky … that my mother was an entrepreneurial businesswoman,’ Green began. ‘That was a good start for me, and I’m pleased to say, Mum, I put it to good use.’ There was a round of applause. He went on to say that Alma had ‘even phoned me yesterday to discuss one of the properties – “I think maybe we should do this sort of deal, but I don’t think we should do it because I don’t really like the tax situation” … She’s still energetic, enthusiastic, she travels the world with her friends, she still looks after the same properties she’s had for fifty years, she still phones the solicitors, writes to the accountants – and bravo, well done to you, Mum.’

Chloe and Brandon awkwardly performed a specially prepared song. ‘Hello, Grandma,’ they sang. ‘It’s you we should be thankin’, for what Dad’s been bankin’. It’s ’cos of you that we don’t have to work.’ Simon and Georgia Neville, two of Elizabeth’s children, gave a speech. They reminisced about Sunday lunches at Alma’s flat in Maida Vale, where she served home-made chicken soup with matzah balls, and about trips to see Beauty and the Beast and Starlight Express in the West End. They joked about her love of gambling. ‘If anyone in this room thinks that Alma’s lost any zest for life, you only need to turn up at Les Ambassadeurs on a Saturday night to see that she’s lost none of it,’ Georgia said. Simon mentioned Alma’s right-wing politics and ‘her favourite topic of asylum seekers’. ‘You can ask her later on her views on that, but be prepared,’ Georgia warned the crowd.

Green introduced the main entertainment, ‘a special surprise from us’ – the ‘Diana’ crooner Paul Anka, who had flown in from Los Angeles. Anka danced with a delirious Tina during a rendition of ‘Put Your Head on My Shoulder’. She tried to lean into the microphone. ‘I’ll do the singing, lady,’ Anka quipped. ‘You’ve got as much chutzpah as he does,’ he added, looking at Green. Anka tried to sing ‘Puppy Love’ with Robert Tchenguiz, the overfed property tycoon, who bellowed the lyrics like a drunken walrus. ‘Don’t quit the day job,’ Anka advised him. The evening ended with a bespoke version of ‘My Way’ for Alma, who joined Anka on stage. ‘You are it, my darling,’ Anka told her, gazing into her eyes. ‘Your voice is it,’ she replied. Then Anka sang, ‘We wish you love, and mazel tov, for living your way.’ Tina’s cheeks glistened as Alma cut a giant cake decorated with ninety candles. On their way out at the end of the night, guests were given copies of a newspaper from the day Alma was born in 1918. Goldman’s Mike Sherwood remarked, ‘We were all in tears and Alma was completely unfazed.’ Green’s mother said, ‘I had a very good night … It was not like being in London, it was like being in Las Vegas.’

While the attention of the Green family’s matriarch shone on Philip, Elizabeth was left in the shade. Alma’s flat in Maida Vale was like a shrine to her son. The walls were covered with newspaper cuttings reporting his success, and the mantelpiece was crammed with photographs of him and Tina. There was also a huge collection of dolls and trinkets she had picked up at Church Street market near the Edgware Road. On one occasion, when Elizabeth was featured in the Jewish Chronicle, she framed the article and asked Alma if she would put it up on the wall. ‘Yes, when you actually achieve something,’ her mother snapped.

Alma died of a heart attack at the Wellington hospital in St John’s Wood on 15 January 2015, aged ninety-six. Her will contained a final bitter pill for her daughter. As executors, she had nominated Philip and his best man, Edward Landau. She left £100,000 to Elizabeth, £20,000 to her helper Anicia Wass and £25,000 each to her five grandchildren, Chloe, Brandon, Simon, Jacob and Georgia. The rest – about £2.3 million – was to be put into a trust for Sir Philip and Lady Cristina Green, who were already billionaires several times over. Alma said she wanted them to ‘provide for the wellbeing, comfort and needs of my daughter Elizabeth in the future’. But she was careful to make the request ‘without creating any legal obligation’.