Philip Green will be remembered as a nasty stain on capitalism

There really isn’t much left to be said about Sir Philip Green as his Arcadia fashion empire collapses into administration, taking the Debenhams chain down with it, unless a new rescuer steps in. An aggressive rag-trade wheeler-dealer since he started selling cheap jeans in the 1970s, Green was also once regarded as a brilliant merchandiser — until, it seems, he got too rich to bother keeping up with online competitors such as Asos, rising brands such as Zara and price-slashers such as Primark.

So he won’t be remembered for his fashion sense — as the era’s other trouble-prone ‘King of the High Street’, George Davies of Next and Per Una, might be. Nor will Green ever be given much credit for grudgingly agreeing to pay £363 million to bolster the bombed-out pension fund of BHS, two years after he tried to relieve himself of that potential burden by selling the store group for £1 to the former bankrupt (now convicted tax evader) Dominic Chappell.

What will be remembered are the £1.2 billion of dividends taken out of Green’s businesses in the name of his Monaco-resident wife Tina when the going was good, the swearing at journalists, the bullying allegations, the superyachts, the grotesque high-bidding at gala charity auctions, the gleaming bald pate — and the rising tide of job losses: 11,000 when BHS went down in 2016, now up to 13,000 at risk in Arcadia’s Topshop, Burton, Evans and Wallis outlets in the absence of new buyers for the brands.

When a parliamentary select committee savaged Green’s handling of BHS in 2016, I constructed a partial defence of him as ‘a rough-diamond dealmaker being brought down by a very rough form of justice’ — on the basis that not everything that has happened to high streets and pension funds in the past 20 years was entirely his fault, as some MPs seemed to think.