Be careful you don’t have an accident, he warned, as I just tried to do my job

Every single encounter I have had with Sir Philip Green has ranged from the merely uncomfortable to the shockingly nasty. I have been repeatedly stunned with frustration and disbelief that a knight of the realm could talk to anyone – even a journalist – like he did.

In the beginning, when he was still widely considered to be the “king of the high street”, he would keep me on my toes by unexpectedly erupting at the most innocuous questions. He would deliberately speak to me like a little girl – “Honey, honey, why are you asking me these questions?” – and be dismissive and patronising until he realised that I had information that could be of use.

Then he would delight in doling out titbits of information like favours, in the hope that he could call in the debt at a later stage. He didn’t just use this tactic with journalists either. Politicians and chief executives would later laugh about how they had been summoned to his suite at the Dorchester, have a meaty arm thrown around their shoulder and told “if you ever need anything” to call him. It was very much quid pro quo. It was how he operated, dealing his way through the rag trade, and becoming a big shot.

As BHS imploded, he would always answer calls to his ageing Nokia (rather than not comment, which would be the easier option).

But his answers were often ludicrous. He would emphatically deny ever hearing of an investment outfit that I knew he had met a day earlier. “Never heard of ‘em.” He seemed to revel in lying so blatantly. He could not be trusted and yet I still had to keep calling in order to give him right of reply. And he would keep answering. What initially was a bit of a cat-and-mouse game became a loathsome task. I’d pick up the phone with trepidation, knowing that my ears would be left ringing afterwards. Towards the end he would frequently scream that we were after him and out to get him. “Fine, call me a rapist or a paedophile if that’s what you want,” he once shouted.

I assured him that that wasn’t what my article on his dealings with Dominic Chappell was about.

His tone was often intimidating. He once said that I needed to be careful not to have an accident. Already aware of his fondness for threatening physical violence, I still couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. I did my best to put on a brave face and cheerily asked him to clarify what he meant. He told me I just needed to be careful about what I wrote.

Like many others I laughed it off – retail journalists all have their war stories about interactions with Green – but it shook me. But the truth, I suspect, is that the aggression, the bullying, the verbal abuse was the result of the fact that he is incredibly thin-skinned.

In recent times it wounded him terribly to realise how far his star had begun to fall.

His allies said that no one was as upset by the debacle that BHS became as he was.

After being hauled in front of MPs he met his nemesis Frank Field, the Labour chairman of the work and pensions committee, who delighted in working Green and his lawyers into a fury. “Why don’t you just go off and marry Frank Field, you two deserve each other,” Green once spat in response to a question I had asked him in the normal course of doing my job.

It was just the kind of ridiculous outburst that were typical of a bully used to getting his own way – and slowly but surely discovering he couldn’t anymore.