Philip Green faces loss of knighthood after MPs vote
Politicians denounce tycoon as ‘billionaire spiv’ over collpase of UK retailer
The House of Commons has demanded that Sir Philip Green be stripped of his knighthood, after MPs lined up to denounce the Topshop tycoon as a “billionaire spiv” who was “not particularly good at retail”.
The vote is the latest blow in the fierce fight for Sir Philip’s reputation triggered by the collapse of BHS, the high street chain that made him a billionaire.
The affair has cost 11,000 jobs, put the pensions of 20,000 people at risk and made Sir Philip an unwilling emblem of Theresa May’s campaign to “reform capitalism” so it works for everyone as opposed to the privileged.
Thursday’s vote followed a two-hour “debate” on the report of a parliamentary inquiry into the collapse of BHS, little more than a year after Sir Philip sold the high street chain for £1.
At times the parliamentary session seemed more like a contest to concoct the most acidic formulation of a single claim: that Sir Philip made his fortune not by reviving BHS, but by draining the retailer of cash and then selling a fatally weakened business to the former bankrupt who presided over its demise.
“He took the rings from BHS’s fingers,” said Iain Wright, in an apparent reference to the £400m in dividends BHS paid during the early years of Sir Philip’s ownership, mostly to his wife Tina.
“He beat it black and blue,” the Labour MP continued. “He starved it of food and water, he put it on life support, and then he wanted credit for keeping it alive.”
Despite the parliamentary vote, Sir Philip will keep his knighthood unless a committee of civil servants and luminaries decides to remove it.
The honours forfeiture committee is unlikely to consider the case until it becomes clear whether Sir Philip has honoured his pledge to “sort” the pension deficit left behind by the demise of BHS through handing over a sizeable chunk of his personal fortune.
Earlier this week Sir Philip published a legal opinion he commissioned from two leading lawyers, which dismissed the MPs’ accusations as “bizarre”, “unsupportable”, and tainted by “bias”.
The lawyers were especially critical of Frank Field, the inquiry’s pugnacious co-chair, who declared in May, even before the inquiry had heard from its first witness, that Sir Philip should hand over more than £500m if he wanted to keep his knighthood.
Mr Field, who has criticised Sir Philip of running the company his family owns as a personal fiefdom, described the retail mogul as “a character most like the Napoleon I read in the history books when I was at school”.
It was the opening bid in a crescendo of insults directed at a man once called the King of the High Street.
“I’ve always thought that Sir Philip Green was more of a Maxwell,” Labour veteran Dennis Skinner said. “He had the money, he had the yacht, and he robbed them of the pensions.”
For Labour MP David Winnick there was no need for parallels.
“He is a billionaire spiv who should never have received a knighthood,” he said. “A billionaire spiv who has shamed British capitalism.”