Quote of the day

Will Hutton in The Observer on Sir (for the moment) Philip Green (here):

Green was a foul-mouthed, amoral deal-maker with an ego the size of a house who could only float to the top in the crazed world of credit-driven, property-bubble Thatcherite and Blairite capitalism, aided and abetted by an unsavoury cast list of loan sharks, fraudsters, indulgent bankers and fawning journalists, notably the former Sunday Times business editor Jeff Randall to whom he regularly fed gossip in return for admiring write-ups.

He had a talent for cutting costs, but his greater talent was creating the reputational halo that allowed him to get finance to acquire the next business and then using every available loophole to direct as much money as possible to himself – from the £1.2bn tax-free dividend to his wife in Monaco in 2005 to the attempt to avoid his responsibility for the BHS pension fund after he had knowingly sold it to a bankrupt. Under intense public pressure last year he finally inserted £363m into the fund.