Foul-mouthed bully who left young women in tears — and showered pals in champagne as they partied like Nero
BACK in January, a spectacular scandal enveloped the Presidents club, a charity which had for years been close to Sir Philip Green’s heart.
With the so- called # metoo movement dominating the news agenda, this organisation found itself splashed across the front pages, amid claims that its annual fundraising dinner at The Dorchester Hotel was, in effect, a hotbed of sexual harassment.
According to an undercover reporter from the Financial Times, the roughly 130 ‘tall, thin and pretty’ young women, who’d been hired to work as ‘hostesses’ at the all-male shindig, spent the night being groped, fondled and lewdly propositioned by the mostly middle-aged guests.
One poor girl said a guest had exposed his penis to her, while eating his dinner. Another was propositioned by a ‘ society figure’ who declared: ‘I want you to down that glass, rip off your knickers, and dance on that table.’
At the disco later, several dozen high- end escort girls were ushered onto the dance floor, all wearing scarlet dresses.
The revelations had sparked a mixture of outrage and soul- searching at the culture of misogyny among the business tycoons and minor celebrities on the event’s guest list.
Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading beneficiary of proceedings, announced it would return its ‘tainted’ donations (a decision that was later reversed), while the charity commission was launching an investigation.
Not long afterwards, the Presidents club would collapse. All of which struck Sir Philip as very sad indeed.
For the billionaire. who had for years counted the Dorchester dinner as a fixture in his social calendar, was among the 360 wealthy men at the event. And he told me that the rapidly escalating controversy was all a big fuss over nothing.
‘This is all total bull****,’ he declared. ‘All this stuff that supposedly went on, it’s nothing worse than what would happen in any nightclub in London any night of the week.’
He added that it was ‘****ing tragic’ that ‘political correctness now means money will no longer go to dying children’.
It was also very much par for the course for 66-year-old Green, a highly combative public figure whose bombastic personality lies at the heart of his journey from North London rag trader to one of the most successful but polarising businessmen of the modern era.
TO his supporters, he is a larger-thanlife commercial genius with the gift of the gab and an eye for a deal, who, through hard work and no little talent, has built a fashion and retail empire that employs tens of thousands and plays a central role in keeping Britain plc ticking over.
Yet to critics, the ‘king of the High Street’ has always had a dark side as a foul-mouthed and petulant workplace bully, who shamelessly dodges tax by spending half the year on a yacht and funnelling most company earnings to his wife through Monaco, and whose comically lavish lifestyle represents the unacceptable face of capitalism.
Wherever the reality lies — and it’s possible that both interpretations are true — few would deny that Sir Philip is an exacting taskmaster prone to explosive tantrums when he believes he has even the slightest cause to complain.
The culture at Arcadia HQ is perhaps best summed up by a well-worn anecdote concerning the installation of a new IT system which went horribly over budget.
Sir Philip duly called the executive responsible into his office and showed him a large pile of cash sitting on his antique desk.
‘That’s how much you have cost me,’ he barked — and fired him.
Though capable of immense charm (and in possession of a sharp sense of humour), Green has little time for political correctness and, in unguarded moments, can cause great offence — a fact laid painstakingly bare earlier this year by biographer Oliver Shah.
His book, Damaged Goods, quoted Brian Hill, the former head of menswear at department store BHS, calling Green a ‘thoroughly disgusting human being’ due to his treatment of office staff.
‘You would see young women, particularly, reduced to tears.
‘ Philip would often have a meeting before he flew off in his jet to Monaco, and he would just pick one person and batter them. The horrible thing is that sometimes you would sit there and think, “Thank God it’s not me”.’
According to the book, Green once told a female buyer at his department store chain BHS: ‘You’re absolutely ****ing useless. I should throw you out of the window, but you’re so fat you’d probably bounce back in again.’
The book also describes how many executives left Green’s Arcadia empire after the collapse of BHS, including Wesley Taylor, the former brand director at the High Street chain Burton.
Mr Taylor, who is black, then complained that Green used racially abusive language towards him after he walked out. Sir Philip denied the claim, and the two men settled out of court.
When I asked Sir Philip this summer about the alleged incidents, he confessed to having a short fuse. However, he vigorously denied misogynistic behaviour and was adamant he would never make racist remarks.
The latter allegation, he said, was particularly galling because he’d recently become a grandfather to a mixed-race child called Jayden — born to his daughter chloe and her boyfriend Jeremy Meeks, a tattooed former gang member and divorced father, aged 34, who has served two jail terms in his native california.
‘Am I a racist?’ said Sir Philip. ‘The fact is that I’ve had a black chauffeur for the past 12 years.
‘His name is Ray, and when he reads people claiming that his boss is a racist, he feels like going round to punch this Shah man in the mouth.’
When I asked why ( if the allegations were indeed untrue) he didn’t simply sue Mr Shah for libel, Sir Philip responded: ‘ I’m not going to take him to court. I won’t give him the pleasure.
‘He’s a cheap hooker who couldn’t afford to pay damages anyway. If he was an expensive hooker, I’d sue.’
In truth, Shah — Business Editor of the Sunday Times — was very far from the only person to have publicly raised questions about Sir Philip’s treatment of office staff.
Back in 2016, for example, the Daily Mail diarist Sebastian Shakespeare published an interview with Samantha Watson, former personal assistant to Green’s friend and associate Richard Desmond.
Watson claimed she was frequently left fighting back tears after being berated by the Topshop tycoon. If she ever kept him waiting on the phone, Watson claimed, Green would call her a ‘ thick, fat Geordie c***’. She added: ‘I was dead scared of him.’
On another occasion, in 2003, the Guardian newspaper published a transcript of a telephone call between Green and one of its business reporters in which he said that the newspaper’s financial editor, Paul Murphy, ‘can’t read English. Mind you, he is a ****ing Irishman’.
Later in the conversation, he described a journalist called Ian Griffiths, who had questioned whether Green’s companies were quite as profitable as previous reports had suggested, as ‘ some old c*** from the Independent’.
The following year, when he was involved in a bitter (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to buy Marks & Spencer, Sir Philip became involved in a public confrontation with the firm’s then chief executive Stuart Roses, grabbing him by the lapels and subjecting him to a stream of abuse.
‘I hear you’ve been calling me a plonker,’ Rose said. ‘I’m not calling you a plonker,’ replied Green. ‘You’re a c***.’
SUPPORTERS of Sir Philip have always sought to defend his more colourful behaviour by arguing that it’s typical of many self-made men. And a degree of impatience is perhaps to be expected in an entrepreneur who made his fortune in ‘fast fashion’, with its emphasis on bringing catwalk trends to the High Street in quick time.
However, it should be stressed that his isn’t exactly a rags-toriches story. Born in croydon in 1952, the son of a successful property developer, he was educated at carmel college, a private boarding school in Oxfordshire.
Tragedy struck when he was 12 and his father, Simon, died of a heart attack. Three years later, he was expelled from the school in what Shah’s biography claimed were somewhat scandalous circumstances. Neighbours were
told that he’d been caught ‘****ing’, with one adding ‘we didn’t discover whether it was another boy, the matron, or a cat’.
Whatever the real cause, Sir Philip’s early ejection from school helped spawn a hugely successful career. After an apprenticeship at a footwear retailer, at the age of 21 he entered the rag trade with the aid of a £20,000 family loan.
In the Eighties he bought the Jean Jeanie chain, selling it for a large profit, and using the capital to become a serious player on the High Street fashion scene. After the failed attempt to buy Marks & Spencer in 1999, which turned Sir Philip into a public figure for the first time, the following year he joined the ranks of the seriously rich by purchasing BHS and using it as a springboard to acquire Arcadia — the group which runs Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge.
While Sir Philip runs the business, its ownership is largely controlled by his wife, Tina, who lives in Monaco. (Green himself commutes to London each week.) The arrangement famously allowed the family to avoid UK tax on a £1.2 billion dividend from Arcadia in 2005 (saving around £285 million), though that didn’t stop Tony Blair recommending him for a knighthood in 2006.
An eternal showman — a character trait which has for years helped such brands as Topshop rise above the competition — he’s been prone to famous displays of conspicuous consumption.
In 2006, he paid £60,000 at a celebrity charity auction at Annabel’s nightclub to see supermodel Kate Moss ‘ snog’ socialite Jemima Khan.
Then there is his habit of throwing ostentatious parties, which to critics has provided a stark illustration of the indulgence his taxefficient lifestyle affords.
For his 50th birthday in March 2002, he famously flew 220 guests from Luton to Cyprus in a chartered aeroplane, telling them to pack for hot days and cold nights and to bring fleshcoloured underwear.
The flight safety video was personalised with a joke about cocaine: ‘I would like to introduce you to the captain (an image of boggle-eyed pilot appeared on the screen). His name is Charles … Some of you may have been this high with Charlie before, but for others it’s a new experience.’
At the ensuing £5million bash — attended by, among others, Jeremy Beadle, Stirling Moss, Prince Albert of Monaco and Rod Stewart — guests were provided with togas to wear. A thousand bottles of wine, 400 bottles of champagne and 40kg of caviar was consumed. Sir Philip himself dressed as the Emperor Nero.
His 55th birthday in 2007 was even more ostentatious. The party, rumoured to have cost £20 million, was held on an island in the Maldives, with live music performances by Gladys Knight & the Pips, George Michael, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin.
When he turned 60, Sir Philip flew 150 guests to Mexico at a cost of £6 million. He allocated each guest 15 bottles of £250 Pol Roger champagne paid Stevie Wonder and The Beach Boys to perform.
His 65th birthday last year was scheduled to be even more jawdropping. But then came the BHS pensions scandal, and an intense wave of scrutiny which, in a roundabout way, has led to this week’s PR kerfuffle.
The BHS scandal, of course, saw Sir Philip dubbed ‘Sir Shifty’.
Yesterday’s events saw the less flattering nickname, ‘Sir Sleazy’, being thrown around.
Time will, of course, tell whether it is allowed to stick.