How can someone who milks a cash cow dry be king of the high street?

Almost three years have now passed since we began our inquiry into the disaster that befell BHS. As the evidence poured in, what unfolded was little short of a Greek tragedy. At times our hearings resembled a circular firing squad, as the various players sought to dodge responsibility by offloading blame onto anyone but themselves. The most egregious example of this was Sir Philip Green himself, for all his protestations that he was happy to hold his hands up and accept anything he had done wrong. At no point has he shouldered the responsibility that so obviously rests squarely with him.

When Sir Philip acquired BHS, its pension scheme was in surplus. On his watch, it spiralled into substantial and unsustainable deficit. His claims that he knew nothing about this – and would have stopped it if he had – were simply fantastical. In the early days of BHS, the Green family grew ever richer on the spoils they plundered from the company. Money that could have bolstered the pension fund found its way into their deep pockets instead, with disastrous results for tens of thousands of people.

Sir Philip tried to tell us that the problems at BHS arose simply because he had “too strong an emotional tie with both the people and the business”.

Looking at the aftermath, that is hard to stomach: 11,000 BHS employees lost their jobs; 20,000 current and former employees saw their pensions put at serious risk.

Sir Philip now seems to think he deserves some sort of praise for stumping up £363million to plug the gaping hole in the pension scheme that he himself was responsible for. I doubt he will get much thanks from the people who lost their jobs or were left with smaller pensions than they were expecting. If this is how he treats people he cares too much about, I dread to think how he might treat anyone about whom he cared too little.

The stories that have emerged from Arcadia employees brave enough to speak out further give the lie to the image of the businessman who simply cared too much. Sir Philip maintains that he is guilty only of “banter”. The alacrity with which he shovels money to fat-cat lawyers is astounding – so much so that a judge had to tell Schillings to reduce their hourly charging rate.

Now that he has failed in his costly bid to gag the Press, both sides of the

There seems to be little our regulatory system can do to tackle behaviour that most consider beyond the pale

story can at last be heard. There seems to be precious little our regulatory system can do to tackle behaviour that most of us consider to be beyond the pale. It failed to protect BHS workers and their pensions.

It was powerless to act when members of the Green family made eye-watering profits off BHS properties, and when Sir Philip acted on both sides of the deal to sell BHS to a man he knew to be a wholly unsuitable purchaser. An adverse finding by a regulator might prompt the Honours Forfeiture Committee to act. But what guidance will it find when our regulators are so hopelessly inadequate?

Sir Philip was given his knighthood for services to the retail industry. But our inquiry found little evidence to support his reputation as the supposed “king of the high street”. He distinguished himself not by his retail acumen but by his skill in milking a cash cow dry. In the years that have followed, Sir Philip himself has trashed his own reputation yet further. It is hard now to think that he has done anything other than an enormous disservice to reputable retailers. At a time when so many of our best-loved high-street chains are failing or teetering on the brink of collapse, it must surely be time to ask whether he really deserves one of the highest honours our nation can bestow.