15.

The Crash

At 8.21 a.m. on Friday 22 April 2016, Dominic Chappell sent me a text message saying, ‘We are not going into admin.’ Since the first Sunday Times exposé on his background more than a year earlier, the serial bankrupt had been forbidden from speaking to the press by his minders. As BHS hurtled towards a cliff, he lost discipline and opened up a back channel.

It was the end of a long, frantic week. The events that would lead to BHS’s demise had been set in motion five days earlier. Sir Philip Green had planned to put the department store chain into administration by appointing Neville Kahn, his old ally at Deloitte. But Kahn had explained that Deloitte was conflicted because of its previous work on BHS’s pension funds. For various reasons, so too were Grant Thornton, KPMG and PwC. Kahn recommended Phil Duffy, a managing director in the Manchester office of the restructuring firm Duff & Phelps. Duffy was a chipper character who had previously worked on the administrations of the furniture retailer MFI and the bookseller Borders. He had also been administrator to three small property companies in the Arcadia Group. At 4 p.m. on Monday, 18 April, Green made a terse call to Duffy and asked him to come to London the next day. He did not give a reason.

Duffy and one of his partners, Ben Wiles, arrived at Arcadia’s headquarters on Berners Street at 10.30 a.m. Green explained the situation. At midday, the full BHS board arrived. According to a professional who was present, there were ‘fireworks’ between Green and Chappell as Chappell initially tried to resist the appointment of Duff & Phelps. Olswang and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Retail Acquisitions’ lawyers, advised Chappell that BHS was close to becoming insolvent. They told him there was no alternative. Chappell then tried to argue for the appointment of a smaller accountancy firm, David Rubin & Partners. He gave up when it was explained to him that David Rubin was nowhere near big enough to handle a job of BHS’s scale. The administration was provisionally slated for the end of the week – Friday 22 April. Chappell hurriedly cancelled a weekend of clay pigeon shooting in the Cotswolds.

In a fit of pique after the Arcadia meeting, Chappell called for the dismissal of Darren Topp and the barrister Dominic Chandler, whom Retail Acquisitions perceived had defected to Topp’s side. Chappell also demanded legal action against Michael Hitchcock for ‘miss leading [sic] the board in relation to losses’. BHS’s owner was persuaded to withdraw the proposals, but his attempts to dismiss Topp and Chandler indicated how quickly relations were descending into a state of outright hostility.

Topp quietly warned Green about Chappell, ‘This guy is desperate for money. He wants to feather his nest.’ Green contacted one of the most senior executives at Barclays, BHS’s bank. He asked Barclays to flag any unusual transactions involving BHS’s main account. The next day, Chappell transferred £1.5 million to BHS Sweden, a new shell company set up by his father’s friend, Lennart Henningson. BHS had no stores in Sweden. When Topp was alerted to the transaction by his head of treasury, Harry Carver, his first instinct was to call the police. Instead, he rang Chappell, who knew about it straight away. Topp told him, ‘That’s theft.’ Topp later recounted to Parliament, ‘Now, if I take out all the expletives, [Chappell] basically said, “Do not kick off about this, Darren. I’ve had enough of you telling me what to do over the last few months. It’s my business, I can do what I want. And if you kick off about it, I’m going to come down there and kill you.” Then he threatened to kill me again. And I know it sounds silly, but apparently he says he was in the helicopter squad of the SAS. I know he’s got a gun.’

The £1.5 million that Chappell moved had been set aside to pay the wages of shop staff, most of whom were on £7 an hour. Topp thought Chappell’s behaviour was ‘disgusting’. Chappell apparently told him, ‘You’ve never done an administration before, Darren. You do not know what it’s like. There’ll be hell to pay and costs to pay, and I want to make sure I look after my home team.’

Green rang his contact at Barclays again and went ‘absolutely mental’, according to a BHS executive who witnessed Green’s end of the conversation. Green shouted, ‘Can you explain to me how the movement of £1.5 million to a company that isn’t part of the group, in a country where we don’t trade, is not an unusual transaction?’ It must have been processed by a junior Barclays clerk who forgot about the instruction. Chappell was forced to send the money back to BHS, although he initially kept £50,000, claiming it was a fee for currency conversions. After pressure from Duff & Phelps, he eventually returned £43,000, keeping £7,000.

On Thursday, 21 April, at 11 a.m., the BHS board unanimously voted to appoint Duff & Phelps. Then Chappell pulled another surprise. He contacted a representative of Mike Ashley, the billionaire founder of Sports Direct, and tried to arrange an emergency sale. Ashley was a controversial suitor: he and Green had a complicated relationship. They had known each other since the mid-1990s, when Green was running Foothold, the chain of trainer shops that was part of Owen & Robinson. The overweight entrepreneurs had much in common. They loved gambling and were sometimes seen together at 50 St James’s or Les Ambassadeurs on Park Lane. Green had tinkered with Tottenham Hotspur and Everton; Ashley bought Newcastle United. The tycoons’ friendship was shot through with insecurity and rivalry. They often played games, keeping each other in the dark and fighting recreational proxy battles through obscure deals. Unlike Green, Ashley could come across as shy and socially awkward, but he was capable of behaviour that made Green look like a wallflower. On one occasion, he was alleged to have downed twelve pints of lager with vodka chasers in a drinking contest with one of his junior analysts, then vomited into a pub fireplace to applause from his senior team.

In his teens, Ashley had been a county squash coach – although nobody would have guessed it from the enormous beer gut he cultivated in adulthood. He gave up squash at sixteen and bought a sports equipment shop in Maidenhead, Berkshire, using £10,000 borrowed from his parents, who mortgaged their bungalow. Ashley’s father, Keith, a production manager at Young’s Seafood, did the books at weekends. His mother, Barbara, helped out in the shop. Ashley expanded Sports World with brutal efficiency, buying once-great brands such as Lonsdale and Slazenger and discounting them to lucrative oblivion. By 2007, it had more than 400 stores and sales of £1 billion. Ashley renamed the business Sports Direct. With Green’s help, he floated it on the stock market for £2.2 billion, paying himself almost £1 billion in the process. ‘I’m not being funny, but you struggle to spend the interest,’ Ashley told the Sunday Times that year in his mild Estuary accent. Despite the change to his bank balance, he insisted his lifestyle had not changed. ‘Some of our best nights out are impromptu – a few beers and then down the kebab shop,’ he said. ‘We still tell the same old stories, like the time I fell down the fire escape in the Maidenhead store and we still laugh and think it’s funny.’

Like Amber Day two decades earlier, Sports Direct became a magnet for City opprobrium – although Ashley kept a majority shareholding, meaning he could not be removed. First, Sports Direct’s share price crashed, then its independent chairman resigned over governance concerns. Among other things, it emerged that Ashley had settled a £750,000 legal bill using a round of spoof, the coin guessing game (and lost). A defiant Ashley told the Sunday Times he had ‘balls of steel’ and added, ‘Some investors have been great and have been very supportive. But some of these City people act like cry babies. I’m not giving in.’

Ashley had first registered in Green’s circle in 2007, when he attended PG55 in the Maldives. He made an impact by insulting Bob Wigley, the European chairman of Merrill Lynch, the investment bank that had carried out Sports Direct’s initial public offering. Ashley later rang Wigley to apologize after a ticking off from Green. Having built Sports Direct from scratch, Ashley was by far the more talented retailer, but he was a less accomplished dealmaker than Green and he was deferential towards the Topshop owner. He was also twelve years younger. Ashley referred to Green as the ‘Big Emp’. Green called Ashley the ‘Junior Emp’ or ‘Little Emp’. Ashley tended to listen quietly whenever Green vented his spleen over the phone.

Retail Acquisitions already had a connection with Sports Direct, having sold it BHS’s stores in Southampton and Sunderland. Ashley had looked at buying House of Fraser, and he was known to be interested in adding a department store to his empire. In desperation, Chappell rang Justin Barnes, a hard-nosed trademark lawyer who acted as Ashley’s fixer in deal situations. The Junior Emp, who delegated the work to Barnes, kept the talks secret from the Big Emp. The two sides hunkered down in Olswang’s Holborn offices and worked for twenty-four hours non-stop between Thursday and Friday afternoon. Green sniffed a development. He grew suspicious when Chappell asked him for Ashley’s personal mobile number at lunchtime on Friday. At 3 p.m. that day, Ashley finally called the Big Emp, laughing. ‘You knew it was me, didn’t you?’ he said.

There are two entirely contradictory accounts of how Green reacted when he heard about the potential rescue. According to Chappell’s evidence in Parliament, he ‘went absolutely insane’, ‘screaming and shouting down the phone that he didn’t want to get involved with Mike Ashley’. In contrast, Jonathan Hawker, BHS’s PR adviser, described witnessing a second attempt by Ashley to buy the business a few days later, after it had gone into administration. ‘I could hear Sir Philip Green on the administrator’s mobile phone telling him loudly to sell the business to Sports Direct,’ Hawker said in a written statement. ‘Sir Philip was being very forceful and arguing his case so loudly I could hear much of what he said.’

Ashley’s intervention meant the administration had to be delayed. However, Green formally demanded the repayment of his £35 million loan to BHS, giving Chappell an effective deadline of Monday, 25 April. On the Friday evening, Retail Week published a speculative story about the impending administration on its website. It contained inaccuracies, and it was taken down after a furious call from Green to the editor. Eddie Parladorio emailed Chappell and a few others, ‘Who is the leaking pig???’

That weekend was dominated by frantic conference calls between Retail Acquisitions and Sports Direct. Chappell and his crew were eager to keep their gravy train rolling. They wanted a 49 per cent stake in BHS’s international business, the cancellation of all Retail Acquisitions’ debts to BHS and a promise that their consultancy contract would run for at least another six months. In return, they offered to sell BHS for £1. But Sports Direct wanted assurances from the Pensions Regulator and the Pension Protection Fund that it would have no liability for BHS’s pension deficit. Retail Acquisitions’ relations with the pension authorities were barely better than Green’s. Their own advisers had described their first meeting with the regulator as a ‘car crash’. Parladorio had bitterly complained about the regulator’s ‘witch hunt’ over the money they had extracted from BHS. He had even mooted sending a legal threat to the PPF over sceptical comments made in the press by Malcolm Weir, its head of restructuring. On Saturday lunchtime, Chappell told his colleagues it was ‘of utmost importance’ that they secure support from the regulator and the PPF for the sale to Sports Direct, but the authorities were not minded to bend any rules to help Retail Acquisitions rush the deal through. Ashley’s appetite waned over the weekend. At 8.03 p.m. on Sunday, 24 April, Chappell emailed the BHS management team, ‘Gents, With deep hart [sic] I have just had confirmed that SDI [Sports Direct International] will not be coming up to the plate.’

He followed it with a longer note to senior staff. Under the subject line ‘The final curtain’, Chappell wrote, ‘It is with a deep hart [sic] that I have to report, despite a massive effort from the team, we have been unable to secure a funder or a trade sale … I would like to say it has been a real pleasure working with all of you on the BHS project, one I will never forget, you all need to keep your heads high, you are [sic] done a great job and remember that it was always going to be very very hard to turn around. Bonne chance mon ami [sic]. DC.’

Paul Wareham, Chappell’s best man and Retail Acquisitions’ sometime project manager, replied, ‘Gutted. No other words …’ Eddie Parladorio wrote to Chappell, ‘From me to you: well done for a massive effort all the way through. You have never given up and have worked tirelessly on what has been a tough gig from day one. We have had unexpected missiles heaped upon us from the beginning and we have had very little luck in any respect.’

Retail Acquisitions had invested nothing in BHS. It took more than £7 million during its year of ownership in salaries, bonuses and fees for arranging exorbitantly priced financing such as the ‘Wonga’ loan from Alex Dellal. Chappell personally banked £3 million – five times what the average BHS shop assistant would have made in their entire working life – not even counting the £1.5 million loan that was used to pay off the mortgage on his parents’ house. Parladorio received £1.5 million. The cast of hangers-on, such as Lennart Henningson and Keith Smith, was paid generously. On top of that, Retail Acquisitions gave £2.4 million to Grant Thornton and Olswang in success bonuses, and BHS paid close to £5 million more to the firms for rolling advice.

Chappell claimed that he needed to travel to the US for an urgent eye operation. In fact, as BHS’s 164 stores opened their doors on Monday morning to the announcement of administration, he boarded a 10.25 a.m. flight from Heathrow to the Bahamas under the name Captain Dominic Chappell. He was joined by his wife and Eddie Parladorio. It was Phil Duffy of Duff & Phelps who addressed the staff at BHS’s head office half an hour later. He explained that the administrators would continue to run the company for at least a few months while they sought a buyer for some or all of the stores. A handwritten sign appeared in one of the lifts, ‘Where are RAL [Retail Acquisitions Limited]? The thieving shits.’

BHS’s collapse was the biggest high-street crisis since the failure of Woolworths eight years earlier. It sparked an unprecedented firestorm of public anger. Perhaps Green had hoped to copy Richard Branson, who escaped unscathed in 2007 when he sold Virgin Megastores for £1 to its management team, who ran it under the Zavvi name until it went bust fifteen months later, albeit without a pension deficit. Maybe he thought he would be able to manage the press fallout, as he had with the administration of Allders, when hardly any newspapers had even dared to mention his name. But this story was devastatingly simple: Green and his partners, Richard Caring and Sir Tom Hunter, had extracted £423 million of dividends from BHS in the early 2000s. Green had taken tens of millions of pounds more in charges, starved the chain of investment and finally tossed its bones to Chappell and his ragtag consortium, who had gnawed off the last remaining scraps of meat. Eleven thousand staff faced losing their jobs and 20,000 pension-fund members were seeing their retirement plans thrown into jeopardy because of the £571 million hole in the schemes. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, remarked that the whole thing had ‘a whiff of the Robert Maxwells about it’ (although, of course, Green was not accused of stealing from the BHS pension funds, as Maxwell had when he defrauded the Mirror Group).

The Guardian said BHS’s death was a case of ‘murder on the high street’. It advised, ‘Prepare to dig deep, Sir Philip: forget Topshop, the yachts (a new 300-footer is on the way), the fashion academy and the knighthood. Your contribution to retailing will be remembered chiefly by the decency, or otherwise, of your behaviour towards BHS pensioners.’

I called Green that Monday morning. ‘Do you think I’m really going to talk to you?’ he said, his voice infused with a new venom. ‘Fuck off. Is that easy? Fuck off. Do not phone my number. I’ve told your editor I don’t want to talk to you.’ Chappell rang from the Bahamas – although he told me he was in America. He sounded strangely relaxed. ‘We’re not the bogeyman in this one,’ he said. ‘You can portray it how you wish, but go into the business and ask anybody how hard my team have worked to turn this business around. They’ve worked night and day on this for over a year and I doubt you can find one wrong word said about anything that we’ve done in the business.’ Chappell defended Retail Acquisitions’ use of Alex Dellal and the ‘Wonga’ loan. ‘It’s very easy to be criticized about raising expensive money, but listen – when it’s the only girl in town, you’ve got to dance with her,’ he said.

As well as undergoing his alleged eye operation, Chappell claimed to be travelling in search of funds to buy back parts of BHS. ‘Who’s backing him – the Bank of Toytown?’ Green scoffed. It said a lot about Chappell’s falling star that even Paul Sutton now rang me to distance himself from his former protégé. The fraudster described Retail Acquisitions’ dealings with BHS as ‘mind bending’. ‘It’s absolutely mad,’ he said. ‘The day I signed that thing not to be involved, they shafted me completely. I got completely rumped. The minute they got in there, they cut me off.’ He added, ‘On Sunday, I appreciate you’re doing an article and whatever, but try not to throw me under a bus. I’ve had enough of these people trying to damage me.’

Duff & Phelps barred Retail Acquisitions from BHS’s headquarters. Five tumultuous days after the administration began, a group of head-office staff gathered at the Union bar in Marylebone to let off steam. There were tears amid the dogged optimism. ‘People are carrying on,’ one woman said. ‘The business is up for sale. It’s still credible. A lot of us have got a lot of faith in the business.’ She was damning about Chappell and his farewell message. ‘When he called it a project, that was a real insult,’ she said. ‘We had our doubts from the start in terms of his business acumen. He just wanted to make a quick buck for himself.’

Chappell’s name had already turned to ash, but Green’s reputation was burning with a fierce flame. For years, the tycoon had controlled the press with the carrot of leaks about other people’s deals and the stick of his ferocious temper. Over time, he had gradually drifted away from the centre of the business action, coming across less and less information to trade, but his temper had got worse. It was a weaker negotiating position, but he had failed to notice. The Times described the surge of media outrage as ‘payback time for a man never far from an F-word’. Green offered Dominic O’Connell, my editor, a dossier on Chappell’s wrongdoing. ‘Just take me off the menu for Sunday,’ he pleaded. O’Connell refused his deal.

The cultural ground beneath Green’s feet had also shifted. Before the financial crisis, the tabloids had seen his gold Monopoly set and Gulfstream private jet as the well-deserved trappings of success. In the straitened post-crisis reality, taking delivery of a £100 million superboat would have been risky even without a pension scandal in the foreground. Added to the BHS situation, it was a potent symbol of excess. ‘Crisis? Yacht crisis?’ mocked The Sun. The Independent called him ‘a grotesque poster boy for celeb age ultra-exhibitionism’. Even Green’s most loyal supporters in the press turned on him. The Daily Mail’s veteran City editor Alex Brummer, one of his close journalistic contacts, asked, ‘Can the man who milked the millions from BHS really be allowed to keep his knighthood?’ Brummer rapidly revised his view of the billionaire, writing, ‘Green’s career is littered with the bodies of those who got in his way as well as those he seemingly befriended only to dump mercilessly later on.’

Green, who had donated £100,000 to the Mail’s relief fund for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami in south-east Asia twelve years earlier at Brummer’s request, barked at the City editor, ‘How can you do this? I thought I could count on you as an old friend.’ Brummer replied, ‘I never went to any of your parties or went on your yacht, Philip. Those people who did – they’re your friends.’ Green’s anger increased when Brummer wrote a front-page editorial for the Jewish Chronicle declaring that the tycoon’s behaviour had ‘cast a broader pall over the reputation of the ethics of Jews in business’. Green called Brummer and ranted, ‘You’re meant to be a leader of the community! Next time you go to synagogue, pray a bit harder.’

As the Pensions Regulator finally confirmed that it was investigating Green and Chappell, the media frenzy heated up Westminster. Mark Field, Tory MP for Cities of London and Westminster, described BHS’s collapse as ‘a cautionary tale about how the rules of the game can be manipulated by those who are happy to pocket cash in the good and bad times’. Frank Field (no relation), the Labour chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, announced that Green would be called to give evidence in Parliament. Lord Myners, Green’s old foe from Marks & Spencer (who had been ennobled by Gordon Brown eight years earlier), tabled eleven questions in the House of Lords, urging the government to look into the scandal. Green rang Myners and demanded, ‘Why are you asking all these fucking questions? Just come round for a cup of tea and a chat.’ Myners told him that was not how parliamentary questions worked. ‘If you carry on, I’m going to punch you on the fucking nose,’ Green warned him. ‘Philip, you’re getting close to contempt of Parliament,’ Myners said – to which the tycoon growled, ‘I don’t know about Parliament, but I’ve got contempt for you, you cunt.’

Green had not used a PR adviser since his second failed takeover bid for M&S. He preferred to handle calls himself, believing a burst of invective delivered through a battered Nokia was more effective. For the first time, in the aftermath of BHS’s failure, he found himself unable to handle the sheer volume of inbound calls. The outpouring of political anger was also an entirely new phenomenon for Green. In need of support, he hired Neil Bennett, the PR man he had brought in to help the disgraced HBOS banker Peter Cummings four years earlier.

Bennett, a gangly running enthusiast, had spent eighteen years in journalism before going into PR in 2002 – latterly as City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, where he broke landmark stories including Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to take over Manchester United. He had first met Green on a trip to Worcester races in the late 1980s with the rag trader Irvine Sellar, who was celebrating the stock-market listing of his property company, Ford Sellar Morris. Bennett, then a young journalist on the Investors Chronicle, was amused by the gregarious rag trader who reeled off one-liners and threw money at the horses. Years later, at the Sunday Telegraph, he was among the admirers of Green’s supposed BHS turnaround. At Christmas 2000, after Green acquired the business, Bennett invited him and a few other entrepreneurs to play Monopoly at the London Capital Club in the City. Green went to jail more often than any of the other players, declaring that it was ‘a good place to be’. But he coolly took huge risks early in the game and collected rent ‘like a mugger at a cashpoint’. He emerged the clear winner, hoarding ‘an obscene stack of notes’.

Bennett had also seen the darker side of Green. In 1997, Helene, a clothing supplier listed on the London stock market, went bust with debts of £29 million. There had been a number of odd-looking transactions in the year before its demise. Helene had announced its intention to purchase Dyckhoff, a struggling German retail operation that was being run by Green’s associate Harold Tillman. Then a mysterious offshore company called Madrigal International bought Helene’s £14.5 million of bank debt, and the Dyckhoff talks failed. Michael Harris, Helene’s chief executive, was investigated by the Department of Trade and Industry, and in 2001 he was barred from acting as a company director for thirteen years. A judge ruled that he had ‘systematically looted’ Helene, running up credit-card bills of £594,500 and spending £586,900 on travel expenses through a subsidiary. Green was linked to Harris. The DTI investigators obtained telephone records showing a flurry of calls between Helene’s offices and Green’s numbers in spring 1997, although Green argued that they constituted no evidence of any business dealings. The tycoon said he was simply friendly with Harris.

According to a journalist who was involved, when the Sunday Telegraph tried to dig into Helene’s collapse, Green called the reporter who was working on the story, Richard Rivlin, and warned him darkly, ‘We know where you live. We’re going to come after you.’ Bennett, who was Rivlin’s editor, ‘acted impeccably’. He took the remarks seriously enough to call the City of London police, who visited the newspaper’s offices. Incredibly, the police told Rivlin and Bennett to ‘leave Philip alone’, and after taking a statement from Rivlin they went away. Two decades later, the former Sunday Telegraph City editor was perfectly happy to become Green’s spokesman. There was consternation among some of Bennett’s colleagues at the PR firm Maitland. One said that Green showed off in their first meeting, taking a call from Tony Blair and making it clear that he knew best how to handle the media. But the billionaire offered Maitland a £20,000-a-week retainer. (Bennett claimed the rate dropped sharply after the first few intensive months, making it worth far less than the full £1 million a year.)

Bennett’s first job was to engage with the Labour MP Frank Field, joint chairman of the select committee that was due to question Green. Field told the press he would recommend stripping the tycoon of his knighthood unless he repaid the £571 million BHS pension deficit in full. Bennett issued an expletive-free statement that was more finessed than Green’s usual off-the-cuff responses. ‘Clearly he has made his decision as to what he feels the punishment should be without even hearing any evidence from anybody,’ it said. ‘I think Mr Field needs to stand down from the inquiry immediately as he is clearly prejudiced.’ Field stuck two fingers up at Green. The next day, he appointed two special advisers – Lord Myners, the former M&S chairman whom Green had offered ‘a proper fucking kick in the head’ after his second takeover bid, and Sir David Norgrove, as the former head of the M&S pension trustees was now titled, whom Green had accused of spouting ‘pious nonsense’. Field told The Guardian, ‘Sir Philip is a master of bullying but he will find that parliament isn’t for being bullied.’ Myners doubled down a month later, telling the BBC that selling BHS to Chappell had been ‘like giving the keys of your car to a five-year-old’.

Field was an unusual Labour MP. A devout Christian and an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, he was once described in the New Statesman as ‘a cross between a monk and a Tory’. He had forged a career as an odd but principled backbencher, opposing what he saw as the generosity of the benefits system and the iniquities of mass immigration from his seat in Birkenhead, one of the poorest parts of Britain. Field had flirted with a cabinet position only once, when Tony Blair appointed him to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare reform in 1997 – then sacked him for doing just that a year later. Aged seventy-four, Field was now free from political ambition. He commanded cross-party respect for his independent thinking and moral rectitude. Stooped and tall, with sallow skin and a priestly manner, he had an air of serene authority.

Field’s Pensions Select Committee inquiry into BHS was merged with a parallel probe by the business committee, chaired by Iain Wright, the Labour MP for Hartlepool. Wright, forty-four, was very different in character and temperament. A floppy-haired, boyish family man who had been born and raised in the area he represented, he had an excellent commercial nose, having worked for the accountancy firm Deloitte before going into politics. He was a more buttoned-down and conventional politician than Field, and at first he was concerned by some of the unscripted statements his older colleague was giving out to journalists. But Wright’s attitude towards Green hardened when he saw the way the tycoon tried to silence Field.

As the inquiry opened on 9 May, a painting of Green appeared in the window of BHS’s store in Southend-on-Sea. ‘Phillip [sic] Green,’ it said, with the ‘Sir’ crossed out in red pen. ‘Where’s my pension?’ It was representative of the feeling coursing through BHS’s shops, which gave the parliamentary hearings an unusual emotional charge. They took place in Portcullis House, a modern building opposite the Houses of Commons. Witnesses were asked to sit before a horseshoe of ten MPs, led by Field and Wright. Alan Rubenstein, a flinty Scottish banker who ran the Pension Protection Fund, was the first to give evidence. He explained how alarm bells had rung in 2012 when Green was found to have exploited a widely used loophole to lower BHS’s levy payments to the PPF insurance scheme. He said that BHS had put up a property subsidiary as a guarantee for its pension deficit, knowing that the PPF allowed companies backed by guarantees to pay lower premiums. But the subsidiary, Davenbush, had turned out to be ‘pretty much’ worthless. Green had withdrawn the guarantee after being challenged by the PPF, and the lifeboat had passed the information to the Pensions Regulator.

Rubenstein was followed by Lesley Titcomb, the regulator’s chief executive. She put on a shaky and unconvincing performance. Richard Fuller, a Tory MP, pointed out that it had taken Titcomb’s team seventeen months to obtain the infamous 2012 recovery plan for BHS’s pension funds, which stretched for twenty-three years owing to Green’s refusal to pay more than £10 million a year. Even then, Fuller said, the watchdog had not deemed the BHS funds worthy of ‘proactive’ engagement. Titcomb leaned back in her seat as he delivered the criticism, bristling like the mother of an unpopular child at parents’ evening. ‘You’re not much of a regulator, are you?’ Fuller prodded her. ‘Well, I don’t agree with that statement,’ Titcomb replied, leaning forward and clasping her hands. Fuller then asked when the regulator had found out about Green’s £1 sale to Retail Acquisitions. ‘We were not, that I’m aware, advised in advance,’ Titcomb told the surprised MPs. ‘We learned about the deal from the newspapers.’

Green scoffed as he watched. He called Dominic O’Connell, the Sunday Times’ business editor, and complained about the nonsense ‘that fat bird’ was talking. Two days later, Arcadia sent a letter to the select committee. It said, ‘The evidence of Ms Titcomb has been widely reported in the press, but it is incorrect.’ Arcadia said it had told the regulator about the sale on 6 February 2015. The truth turned out to be somewhere in between. As Titcomb then clarified, the BHS trustees had mentioned a buyer called Swiss Rock in February, but the watchdog heard nothing about Retail Acquisitions specifically until the deal hit the press.

The suffering of BHS’s 11,000 staff continued. London landmarks such as Marble Arch were lit up with the slogan #SaveBHS on a Union Jack background. The administrators desperately tried to find a buyer, sounding out suitors including John Hargreaves, the Monaco-based founder of Matalan, and Cafer Mahiroglu, the Turkish retailer. Meanwhile, the hearings intensified in the sticky heat of late May and June as the MPs moved towards Green’s inner circle. The protagonists fought like rats in a sack to point the finger of blame at each other. Anthony Gutman, the Goldman Sachs banker who had helped Arcadia vet Chappell, tried to play down Goldman’s involvement, saying it had been offered a formal advisory role but had declined ‘for commercial reasons’ because the deal was ‘too small’. Then he elegantly skewered Green. ‘We indicated to them that clearly the potential buyer did not have retail experience,’ he said. ‘We indicated that the proposal was highly preliminary and lacking in detail. We also indicated that the bidder had a history of bankruptcy.’ Gutman was sitting alongside Owen Clay, Green’s lawyer at Linklaters, and Steve Denison, Arcadia’s auditor at PwC. Amanda Solloway, a Tory MP, asked them, ‘I am intrigued about what, given [Retail Acquisitions’] lack of experience and the fact that it was paying £1, made it the preferred buyer?’ After a pause, she asked, ‘Anybody?’ There was stony silence from the three men. Later that evening, Gutman and Neil Bennett, Green’s PR man, were seen mingling at the opening night of the Chelsea Flower Show, one of the most prestigious networking events in the City’s calendar.

Next came four of Green’s closest lieutenants. Lord Grabiner, a furrier’s son from Hackney who rose to become one of Britain’s top commercial barristers, was reduced to desperate semantics as he tried to justify his role as Taveta Investments’ £125,000-a-year chairman. Green was always said to have enjoyed treating Lord Grabiner as an ornament, and the select committee picked apart the fact that he had not even been invited to the key board meeting on the evening of 10 March 2015 when the £1 sale to Chappell was finalized. ‘Do you feel aggrieved by that?’ Iain Wright needled him. ‘Because I’m chair of the biz select committee. If there was a meeting of the select committee and I wasn’t invited, I’d be really angry.’ Lord Grabiner stammered, ‘But – but – but – the point is that we had appointed this subgroup to investigate the possibility of disposing of BHS.’ Scowling, the QC admitted he had not been properly briefed on Green’s deal with Chappell until five days after it happened, and that he had found out about Chappell’s bankruptcies only when they were reported in the press.

To his left was his cousin, Ian Grabiner, Arcadia’s chief executive; Paul Budge, the finance director; Gillian Hague, the group’s financial controller; and Chris Harris, its property director. Harris made a comment that quickly came back to bite him when details of Chappell’s complete lack of cash entered the public domain. ‘He had managed to put £35 million in a bank within about three days – I think it was something like that – which showed credibility,’ Harris said. ‘He injected £10 million into the business at the time of the sale. So there were many things – a package of things – that made us comfortable that RAL [Retail Acquisitions Limited] was a credible buyer.’ In fact, the £35 million in Olswang’s escrow account had come from Alex Dellal, and the £5 million, not £10 million, of ‘equity’ Chappell had injected had been a loan – also from Dellal.

Field and Wright summoned the pension trustees past and present, including Dr Margaret Downes, who gave a nuanced picture of relations with Green in her era. She cut an elegant figure in chunky tortoiseshell glasses and a navy jacket. Downes prompted laughter when she described Green as ‘different to most’. She recalled her single face-to-face meeting with the billionaire, and how he had ‘categorically’ refused to pay more than £10 million a year into the pension deficit. But she added, contradictorily, ‘I do believe that he had at heart a caring approach towards the 22,000-odd investment members … He appeared to me to be aware that he had so many members and especially that a number of them were lower-paid.’

Grant Thornton and Olswang hid behind client confidentiality, which Retail Acquisitions refused to waive, and the partners they sent to give evidence were not the ones who had been directly involved with BHS. Paul Martin, the Grant Thornton adviser who had described the deal’s closing meeting with Green as ‘legendary’, and David Roberts, the Olswang lawyer who was said to have been ‘tingling’ with excitement at the prospect of working with Chappell, were nowhere to be seen. Frank Field described the firms’ conduct as an ‘insult’ to Parliament and the nation. ‘Why should we talk to the monkey when we can have the organ grinder?’ he asked. ‘That Philip Green is coming but these bastards aren’t coming is outrageous.’ In the next session, Robin Saunders, the former WestLB banker, answered hardball questions on BHS’s past. She said the magic behind Green’s improvement in profitability in the early years had been cost-cutting. ‘The joke was that everyone would have to use their pencils down to the nub before they could be thrown out,’ she said.

On 2 June, Duff & Phelps announced that all 164 of BHS’s shops would close. Rescue talks had failed with the last remaining bidder, a Portuguese consortium fronted by Greg Tufnell, brother of the former England cricketer Phil Tufnell. Heartbroken store staff put away signs they had prepared saying ‘Thankyou for saving BHS’. Alex Brummer, Green’s former friend on the Daily Mail, wrote, ‘Sir Philip Green plucked the carcass of BHS and the vultures have been picking at what was left ever since.’ Chappell, who had already branded Darren Topp a ‘jumped up store manager’ in a newspaper interview, texted his former chief executive, ‘Well done. I hope you and Michael are happy that you got the out come [sic] you wanted. You fucking prick.’ A BHS spokesman described it as a ‘new low’ for the ‘fantasist’.

A few days later, Topp and Michael Hitchcock electrified the inquiry with their evidence. Topp, who had tried so hard to rein in Retail Acquisitions’ excesses, said that Chappell had ‘literally had his fingers in the till’. He told the story of how Chappell had threatened to kill him over the £1.5 million he siphoned off to Sweden. Hitchcock, who had valiantly tried to support Topp as his interim finance director, also condemned Chappell. ‘Like many others throughout this process, I think I was duped,’ he said. ‘I think the technical term is a mythomaniac. The layperson’s term is that he was a premier league liar and a Sunday pub league retailer, at best.’

Topp and Hitchcock were followed by Stephen Bourne and Mark Tasker, the professionals who had advised Retail Acquisitions in the run-up to the deal; Eddie Parladorio, Chappell’s right-hand man; and Aidan Treacy, the finance director brought in by Retail Acquisitions to rival Hitchcock. Bourne and Tasker answered questions in a straightforward manner, Bourne explaining how Green had ‘effectively’ provided financial ‘assistance in the transaction’. Parladorio kept his head down, allowing the others to do the talking. The way he referred to his close friend as ‘Mr Chappell’ made it sound as if they barely knew each other.

As they finished giving evidence, a porcine, sun-tanned figure in an expensive-looking suit bundled into Portcullis House. Dominic Chappell sat down in front of the select committee, somehow managing to look furtive and indignant at the same time. Running a hand through his thick brown hair, he blamed Green (‘If Philip had assisted us, we could have saved BHS’), the Pensions Regulator (‘We were absolutely held to ransom’), Darren Topp (‘He took it upon himself to start trying to wriggle his way into the ownership structure of the business’) and Michael Hitchcock (‘He is a man of many words and very little delivery’). At times, Chappell sounded almost convincing in his deep public-school tones. But he grew testy when Jeremy Quin, a Conservative MP, asked about the £1.5 million loan from Retail Acquisitions that paid off his parents’ mortgage. ‘[BHS] was a company that was losing millions of pounds a month,’ Chappell protested. To gasps from the audience, he added, ‘What difference would that have made in the grand scheme of the thing? This is a sideshow in what you’re discussing.’

By coincidence, Green’s frenemy Mike Ashley had appeared in Parliament a day earlier to answer questions about the allegedly ‘Victorian’ working conditions at Sports Direct’s warehouse complex in Shirebrook, Derbyshire. At the end of the session, Iain Wright asked Ashley if he had really wanted to buy BHS. ‘I think it’s a “no comment”,’ Ashley’s PR man interjected. But the childish billionaire overruled him. ‘I cannot resist it,’ Ashley blurted out. ‘One hundred per cent, I wanted to buy BHS. Now I am going to get told off by everybody.’

On 30 June 2016, the queueing started early outside the Wilson Room in Portcullis House. At 9 a.m., journalists, lawyers and PR advisers filed in past a portrait of the former Labour chancellor Denis Healey, filling every available seat. The air buzzed with anticipation. At 9.17 a.m., the committee room doors swung open and Sir Philip Green lurched in like an old bull into a ring, his face twisted with contempt for the politicians seated in front of him. He had just had a ninth stent fitted into his coronary arteries, and he looked short of breath. Green had been coerced into coming with threats that his wife would be summoned from Monaco otherwise. In the days before the hearing, there had been intense speculation that he would use the stage to announce a blockbuster payment to BHS’s pensioners. Frank Field had even told the Financial Times that he and his colleagues would ‘just laugh’ at Green if he put less than £600 million on the table. Field and the pensioners were in for a rude surprise.

His eyes flicking from side to side, Green started off with a statement that was half apology, half excuse. ‘Nothing is more sad than how this has ended,’ he said. ‘I hope during the morning you will hear that there is certainly no intent at all on my part for anything to be like this. It didn’t need to be like this. I just want to apologize to all the BHS people who have been involved.’ Then he slipped seamlessly into his trademark mode of menacing banter.

Half an hour in, Green broke off from a discussion about his management methods to snap at the stunned Tory MP Richard Fuller, who had been sitting quietly, ‘You just want to stare at me? It’s just uncomfortable, that’s all.’ Later, when Fuller suggested that Green should have modified BHS’s business model to protect it from online rivals, the billionaire shot back, ‘Without wishing to be rude, maybe in your next career you should try retail.’ Karen Buck, a polite Labour MP, pressed Green to remember whether the BHS trustees had asked for more than £10 million a year in pension contributions. Claiming that he had no idea, he said, ‘You must have been a mind reader in your previous life. Were you?’ Richard Graham, an astute, silver-haired Conservative, pursued Green over a commitment he was said to have made to the then pensions minister Steve Webb. ‘Sir, which bit of “don’t remember” is difficult for you to listen to?’ Green asked. He then advised Jeremy Quin, a podgy shires Tory, ‘Put your glasses back on – you look better with your glasses on.’

Fuller challenged Green over his behaviour. ‘You have complained about Mr Quin putting his glasses on or not,’ he said. ‘Oh, I didn’t complain,’ Green groaned. ‘I was having a joke with him. Lighten up.’ Fuller continued, ‘I just wonder, is that your usual pattern of behaviour, particularly with your directors?’ Green chose not to answer. ‘Shall we carry on?’ he sniffed. The tomfoolery continued. When Iain Wright asked Green what had stopped Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct rescue of BHS, Green pulled out his chequebook and brandished it. ‘One of these,’ he said.

The tycoon said he had not ‘brought twenty people here to share the blame with me’ – although the front row was packed with his supporters, including Neil Bennett and Owen Clay. Green emphasized, ‘It’s not my style to blame anybody else.’ Then he sprayed blame around liberally. He suggested that Dr Margaret Downes, the pension trustees and their advisers had made ‘some stupid, stupid, idiotic mistakes’. He said he ‘one million per cent’ would not have sold BHS to Chappell without Goldman Sachs’ seal of approval. He even blamed me – ‘one of our lovely journalists in the room’ – for damaging Chappell’s chances of restoring BHS’s credit insurance by ‘beating him around the head every Sunday’. One of the most telling moments came when Green protested, ‘I can’t be buyer and seller [at the same time], can I?’ ‘Can’t you?’ asked Iain Wright, pointedly. Arguably, through his direct and indirect financing of Chappell’s acquisition, that was exactly what he had been.

There were two intervals. Green’s advisers made him eat to keep his blood sugar levels up. According to one of Bennett’s former colleagues, the billionaire also made two calls – one to Tina Green and one to Prince Albert of Monaco, who was following the proceedings, anxious about the reputational impact on the principality. Towards the end of his marathon six-hour grilling, when the air in the committee room was heavy with fatigue, Green smiled teasingly at his interrogators. ‘I wrote something down on my pad, because I thought I might forget it,’ the king of the high street said, clearly relishing this late moment of theatre. ‘Whether it’s right or wrong to say it – I thought about “Should I? Should I not?” – I’m going to. Envy and jealousy, my doctor told me, are two incurable diseases. I have done nothing wrong.’

Green larked about and haggled right until the final whistle. As the clock ticked towards 3 p.m., Iain Wright declared that he wanted to wrap up the session in the next thirty seconds. ‘Forty-five – come on, Iain,’ Green implored him, to laughter from the audience. ‘Let’s do one deal.’

By Green’s standards, the expletive-free performance had been a success. In the eyes of ordinary people watching on TV, it was comically terrible. An acquaintance said that Green was shocked by the next day’s coverage. Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail’s sketch writer, described it as ‘six hours of nasal niggle’. He wrote, ‘Here, in this bloated, truculent billionaire, hands caramel from the sundeck of his superyacht, sat the caricature of a capitalist system which … allows tycoons great freedoms.’

There were two further sessions as a coda to the main event. In the first, a dead-eyed and unsmiling Alex Dellal gave crisp but unexpansive answers about the money he had made from Retail Acquisitions (Green’s estimate was a staggering £16 million). Dellal was followed by a red-faced and nervous Paul Sutton, who tried and failed to have two of his victims removed from the audience. Sutton claimed, ‘I maintain to this very day that the way we were doing it, if it hadn’t been stopped, [BHS] would be part of a much larger company now on the stock exchange. It wouldn’t be in the terrible place it’s in right now.’ Last came Neville Kahn, Green’s adviser at Deloitte. Kahn put on a skilful performance, playing down his involvement in the sale of BHS and insisting that he was not part of Green’s inner circle. Chappell, who was watching the live stream, texted me angrily, ‘Neville was up to his neck with this whole deal.’

In the second coda session, one of Europe’s most powerful investment bankers was humbled. Looking surly and uncomfortable, Mike Sherwood of Goldman Sachs described how the bank had helped Green for free because it was hoping for a highly paid role in an eventual sale or float of Topshop. ‘It is obvious to everybody there is a very significant asset that Sir Philip Green owns and at some point he may decide to do something with it,’ Sherwood blundered. ‘That was the transaction that we would like to hang around the hoop for.’

The second session ended with a recall of Paul Budge and Chris Harris, two of Green’s lieutenants, who were joined by Brett Palos, the billionaire’s stepson. Frustrated with their evidence, which he perceived to be evasive, Frank Field finally exploded. ‘A huge amount of money has gone out of these companies, gone to one family,’ he said. ‘Literally, Mr Budge, we have heard evidence that if it was in a novel, you would get the novel thrown back at you by the publisher because it was unrealizable … It is preposterous, what has been presented to us as joint committees, and we are left with 11,000 people’s jobs being destroyed, despite all the protestations that they are the most important people in the world to Sir Philip.’ Field concluded his rant, ‘We have had nothing but people coming here, trying to disguise what has really gone on. That is the truth of it, is it not? You are past masters at this.’ Harris protested that Field’s comments were ‘disrespectful’. It was a bitter ending.

The select committee’s report a month later was excoriating. It condemned Green for the ‘systematic plunder’ of BHS, accusing him of ‘fantastically enriching himself and his family, leaving the company and its pension fund weakened to the point of the inevitable collapse of both’. It said he had rushed through the sale to Chappell, an ‘inept and self-serving’ buyer who was ‘manifestly unsuitable’ to be the director of a company. The report described Retail Acquisitions’ thirteen-month ownership as ‘shambolic’ and said that Chappell and his cronies had ‘used BHS for their personal gain as it crumbled around them’. Lord Grabiner was branded ‘the apogee of weak corporate governance’. Goldman Sachs was criticized for having exercised ‘authority without accountability’. Grant Thornton and Olswang were said to have been ‘content to take generous fees’ for providing Chappell with ‘an expensive badge of legitimacy’. The report, which Iain Wright described as ‘my Sgt Pepper’ – the Beatles’ masterpiece – concluded, ‘Sir Philip Green, Dominic Chappell and their respective directors, advisers and hangers-on are all culpable. The tragedy is that those who have lost out are the ordinary employees and pensioners. This is the unacceptable face of capitalism.’

It was an unprecedentedly damning verdict from a select committee, and it drew support from voices that were not typically critical of free-market capitalism. The Daily Mail ran the front-page headline, ‘The Shaming of Sir Shifty’. Theresa May, who had become the second female Conservative prime minister less than a fortnight earlier following the Brexit earthquake, said the BHS scandal reinforced the need to tackle ‘corporate irresponsibility’. The Institute of Directors singled out Lord Grabiner, describing the lack of oversight during the sale of BHS as ‘staggering’. Chappell seemed to shake it all off like water from a duck’s back. He continued to take my calls, breezily explaining that he had voted for Brexit in protest against the Westminster elite that had just torn apart his ownership of BHS.

Green continued to fight back aggressively against the Sunday Times’ coverage as the gory details of his arrangements with Chappell dripped out. When I picked up the story of the £10 million gifted to Retail Acquisitions in June 2015 – compensation for the cancelled Marylebone House deal – Green said, ‘It’s like a blind darts player throwing darts at me. I can’t be bothered with it, OK? You know the rules. You print it and get it wrong, you get sued.’ He added, ‘You’re a dishonest bloke and you just want to fuck me. OK? And that’s all you’ve done all along. Right? … Maybe you’ll be in the next cell to [Chappell] in the end.’ The conversation ended with Green saying, ‘Have we done anything illegal? Write what the fuck you like.’

I had always had a good relationship with Neil Bennett, his PR man, but it disintegrated over the course of that summer. Seemingly in hock to his powerful client, Bennett refused to answer calls or emails from the Sunday Times. In August, after I perceived that Bennett had lied about a story on one of the rare occasions when he had responded, I wrote a serrated diary piece juxtaposing the PR man’s £20,000-a-week retainer, and the holiday home he had just bought in Bordeaux, with the fortunes of BHS’s staff. Bennett emailed one of my colleagues wishing me a ‘slow and exquisitely painful death’. Then he sent me an emotional email about Green. It said, ‘He’s made a series of bad business mistakes, which he’s admitted. But he’s not the two-dimensional villain you see him as. I see him very differently. He’s someone who’s beaten the odds time and again – failed at school, lost his father when young, suffered multiple business setbacks and almost died from a massive heart attack in 1995. He always comes back and he will this time. Will he use me and discard me? Maybe – as you say I’ve been completely useless in defending him against you and your competitors. But it’s worth noticing that his closest staff and advisers have been around him for years. Why? In the words of Sean, his security guard, “He’s more than a father to me.” ’

In fairness, Bennett was under huge pressure from Green. The billionaire rang his PR adviser on an almost hourly basis to rage about the relentless coverage. Tina and their son, Brandon, took over at weekends, haranguing Bennett via email about his failure to douse the flames. A close friend said that Tina was ‘hysterical’ during those months. Like her husband, she had always believed that Britain was too small-minded to give the Greens the recognition they deserved. In 2005, she told an interviewer, ‘I think, unfortunately, in this country there’s a lot of jealousy. No one likes a winner, they just want the bad news. I just find it very sad.’ Tina liked to see herself as the godmother of Monaco’s social scene, and she was known to admonish those who forgot to address her as Lady Green. Now she found herself splashed across the tabloids as Lady Shifty. The Daily Mail mocked her for cancelling a ‘yacht-warming party’ planned to coincide with the Monaco Grand Prix because of her husband’s forthcoming parliamentary appearance, and paparazzi snapped her the moment she went to inspect the new Lionheart at a harbour in Malta with her dog (‘Another Tough Day in Paradise for Lady Shifty’ was the Mail’s take). There was even speculation that Tina might be stripped of her Monaco residency by the ruling Grimaldi family as part of an effort to dispel the Somerset Maugham view of the tax-free principality as ‘a sunny place for shady people’.

As much as attacks on Tina hurt him, Chloe was Sir Philip Green’s Achilles heel. He had been the first to give his daughter a bottle when she was born in London’s exclusive Portland Hospital, and she had been the only one who could displace Cassius, his cat, as the object of his affections. Chloe described herself as a daddy’s girl. Green admitted that she could wrap him around her little finger. At the outset of the crisis, the Daily Mirror criticized Chloe for partying at the Coachella festival in California and the Chiltern Firehouse restaurant in London. As BHS’s 164 stores closed and the administrators sold off everything – including clothes rails, fridges from staff rooms and mannequins – the Mail ran pictures of Chloe ‘pouting alongside models and millionaires’ in St-Tropez with a pink Chanel bag, which cost £2,000 – ‘the same sum [as] the redundancy packages BHS workers were given’.

Anger was surging through BHS’s 11,000 staff. Lin Macmillan, who had been a manager at BHS’s stores in Aberdeen and Lincoln in the 1980s, called the situation ‘morally repugnant’. She started a campaign titled ‘Sell the yachts, pay the pensions’. A group at the South Shields store posted a picture of themselves holding a sign saying ‘Fuck Phil Green’. Robert Stroud, a shop worker who had been about to celebrate his twentieth anniversary at the branch in Worthing, told his local paper, ‘I feel like I have been chucked out on the scrapheap.’

Green had promised to ‘sort’ the BHS pension hole in his parliamentary appearance, but no deal materialized. As he and Tina set sail from Malta for their first summer cruise aboard Lionheart, sunbathers stuck up two fingers and bared their backsides. Reporters chased the yacht around the Greek islands. Green was too overweight to go jogging, but his doctor advised him to take a morning walk wherever possible. In mid-August, Sky News caught him as he was about to board a tender back to Lionheart after one of his strolls. ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t go away,’ Green growled at Sky’s reporter, David Bowen. ‘Which bit are you not understanding? Go away!’ Richard Caring watched the clip of his former business partner’s humiliation on repeat from the comfort of his superyacht, laughing hysterically with a few friends, revelling in schadenfreude. Three weeks later, Simon Brodkin, a comedian known as Lee Nelson, managed to sail up to Lionheart on a dinghy and attach a banner renaming the 300-ft ship ‘BHS Destroyer’. The Greens had once commanded fear and respect. Over the course of five months they had become the punchline to a national joke.

Jeff Randall watched his old friend’s reputational self-immolation with despair. Randall had enjoyed a long and successful career as a journalist, culminating in six and a half years as Sky News’s chief business inquisitor. Having retired in March 2014 and taken a non-executive job with the engineering company Babcock, he was keen not to involve himself in the row publicly. But from the start, behind the scenes Randall had urged Green to defuse the pension crisis by depositing a big sum into an escrow account pending the resolution of his dispute with the regulator. One day, Liam Halligan, a friend of Randall’s at the Daily Telegraph, texted to ask if he would speak to Frank Field. Randall had known Field since the late 1980s, when Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, commissioned him to write a column as ‘the intelligent voice of the left’. (Field was unfashionably centrist and had twice survived deselection by the hard-left group Militant, joking that his patron saint was Lazarus.) Field had helped Randall with a documentary on pensions in 2007, and the two respected each other. Randall agreed to try to bridge the gulf between Green and his fiercest critic.

Randall thought Green would have to offer about £350 million to solve the BHS crisis. He advised his friend to settle early and present himself as a hero, rather than be dragged to the inevitable solution by a baying mob months later. Field initially said he would be prepared to bless an offer of £400 million as ‘the gold standard of pension rescues’. Randall considered hosting a peace summit for the tycoon and the Labour MP at his home in Essex, but the negotiations never got that far. Green refused to budge above £280 million, and he blew up every time Field made a comment in the press. ‘You can tell your mate Frank Field to fuck off,’ he shouted to Randall down the phone. Randall’s heart sank as Field demanded £600 million on the eve of Green’s select-committee appearance – then Green put on his brash performance, which Randall told friends was ‘suicidal’. Any hope of a rapprochement died when Field described Green as ‘much worse’ than Robert Maxwell in a radio interview. Green threatened to sue. Field told The Times, ‘I thought he would actually do the decent thing. I misread him totally.’

Randall thought Field’s rhetoric was unhelpful, but he was more frustrated by Green’s refusal to listen. He was heard to say that it was ‘like watching a child put its hand in the fire’. The sharp judgement of the cheeky trader he had first met in the late 1980s seemed to have been warped by decades of power and money. A coolness descended over their friendship.

Green had apparently been surrounded by ‘yes’ men for so long that he had lost all perspective. He had grown used to bending bankers, business partners, newspapers and prime ministers to his will. In the aftermath of BHS, he refused to accept that reality itself would not bend. Green commissioned a seventy-nine-page legal opinion from four barristers, including the renowned Lord Pannick, dismissing the select committee’s process as ‘unfair’. He gave an interview to ITV’s Robert Peston, saying he was ‘very, very, very sorry’, before complaining, ‘This has been a horrible, horrible, horrible period.’ The qualified display of contrition was not enough to stop MPs voting two days later, on 20 October, to take away his knighthood. It was less a parliamentary debate, more a free-for-all. David Winnick, a Labour MP, decried him as ‘a billionaire spiv who has shamed British capitalism’. Iain Wright, the Labour co-chair of the BHS committee, came out with a quote that made even Green’s critics wince. ‘He took the rings from BHS’s fingers,’ Wright said. ‘He beat it black and blue. He starved it of food and water and put it on life support. And then he wanted credit for keeping it alive.’