Hello John? It’s me, Philip Green. You know that £50 you gave me a year ago, well, I can give you £35 back. Yeah, I’ve got loads of wonga in my bank but, hey, I’ve got a yacht to run and champagne to buy... what did you just call me there?

company into the ground. I must make sure those poor pensioners are OK.” It’s taken ages to get a penny out of him.

And it isn’t just me saying this, by the way. Iain Wright, who co-chaired the select committee investigation into the collapse of BHS, said: “Green took the rings from BHS’s fingers, beat it black and blue, starved it of food and water, put it on life support and then wanted credit for keeping it alive.”

The Green family, you’ll recall, brought new and previously unheard of dimensions to the phrase “fiddling while Rome burns”.

They didn’t so much fiddle as dance about naked playing electric guitar. They took more than £400million in dividends over the years they owned BHS, paying themselves handsomely while the firm went down the drain.

Green’s wife took up residence in Monaco so as not to trouble the UK taxman. They had lavish parties on board their many superyachts.

Indeed, just months after the collapse of BHS, the Greens were much photographed on a round-theMed yacht trip where they did regular stuff like spraying cases of champagne over each other.

So what finally made Green hold up his hands and do the right thing? Was he unable to look at himself in the mirror any more as he thought about pensioners having to live for a month on what he spends on a single meal? Did he wake up in the middle of the night feeling awful, unable to sleep for thinking about the 11,000 people who lost their jobs when BHS went out of business? Not bloody likely…

First, there was the threat of losing his knighthood. Last October, parliament voted to take this measure if Green did not face up to his responsibi l it ies towards the pensioners he had wronged. Imagine the horror? He’d have to walk around simply being called “Philip”. Or, around these parts, simply being called “Sunburned Testicle Face”.

Then there was the possibility of his £100million superyacht Lionheart (regular scene of those lavish parties) being seized. Finally, and perhaps most hurtfully of all for an egomaniacal baby like Green, there was probably the threat that – God forbid – he would eveventually become so universally loloathed a figure that it would be imimpossible for him to continue to sit in the front row of catwalk shows duduring London Fashion Week with his ararm around Kate Moss.

And so, faced with the loss of all ththings dear to him – prestigious titles, mmassive boats, celebrity friends – GGreen decided to do the right thing.

Which begs a phi losophical ququestion: Is it still the right thing if yoyou have to do it at gunpoint?