Armitage: Reasonable Sir Philip has the measure of MPs’ grilling
I can’t remember hearing Sir Philip Green sound so dejected. “This is a sad place, this country,” he said to me this morning as he prepared to face the parliamentarians.
There was none of the usual fusillade of F-words, no notching up of the dec ibels. “Let’s see what happens,” he sighed. It sounded like nerves.
He has absolutely hated the past few weeks. Because, for all his bombast and braggadocio, his f**k you persona, Sir Philip is a peculiarly sensitive man. He hates criticism and relies on shouting and bullying to get his way. My phone ear is still ringing from the shellacking he was giving me only yesterday over a tip-off we’d had.
Yet today we saw Reasonable Philip. Even, for a while, Boring Philip. The PG who, far from dimly charging into the MPs’ committee and shooting from the hip, had undergone detailed preparation and, I suspect, even professional training.
His answers were mostly calm, and — except when he bizarrely snapped at Richard Fuller MP for “staring”— measured.
Not only that, but he totally dominated proceedings, dodging questions he didn’t like, or sometimes demanding not to have to give certain answers at all. As a result, he got his messages across plain and clear: I invested £600 million into BHS; we made no profit providing back-office services to the company; there was nothing dodgy about the sale and leaseback deals I did on stores; we’re back in talks with the regulator to fix the pension deficit.
Despite their best efforts, the MPs were left flailing, unable to pin anything on him. Apart from the glass of water he spilled at one point, no damage was done.
He needn’t have been so worried.
Banking’s ugly side
Plenty’s been written about the Goldman Sachs banker who, the High Court was told yesterday, haggled for prostitutes as he pitched for lucrative investment mandates from Libyan officials. But more important were alleged details of how senior executives lobbied for the little brother of a key Libyan official to get a highly prized internship at the bank.
An email trail allegedly shows a senior partner first says the brother is “not a suitable candidate” for an internship, before another has a better idea — hiring him permanently: “it would be a great chance to actually get to know him well and get closer to his country… I think we would extract more value than having him in a rotation or the official internship program”.
So the bank was hatching a plan to hire a princeling relative of an official in a poor, backward country so as to “extract value”.
Not pretty, is it?
