Any other Business

Shoppers stay home as rates and floods rise — but there’s a bit of better news for M&S

Shoppers have spent these past few weeks sheltering from incessant rain, rising interest rates and renewed threats of terrorism. Fuel- and flood-hit food prices are on an up-trend too, so we must brace ourselves for a spate of High Street gloom. At Marks & Spencer, like-for-like sales were up only 2 per cent in the April–June quarter, compared to a rise of more than 8 per cent in the same quarter of 2006. Still, that was slightly less bad than the stock market expected, and there was one bit of better news for M&S this week: George Davies is thinking of leaving.

Davies was hired in 2001 to create a new range, ‘Per Una’, to help M&S shed an increasingly frumpy image. He did just that and the group has been duly grateful, buying out his equity interest for £125 million and paying him a bigger bonus than that of chief executive Stuart Rose. Davies’s role has gradually reduced to a part-time chairmanship — two of his daughters run Per Una from day to day — but the media still loves him and it’s not hard to imagine the collective sigh of relief in the M&S boardroom at the news, given front-page treatment on the eve of the trading statement, that the great designer-entrepreneur is thinking aloud about moving on and starting up another new retail venture of his own.

The creator of Next in the 1980s and the ‘George’ range of cheap clothing for Asda in the 1990s, Davies is an archetype of the kind of executive referred to in modern management-speak as ‘high-maintenance’ — the talented but difficult one who requires industrial quantities of ego-soothing to keep him at the peak of his game.