Like all right-minded contributors to a company pension scheme, Lost in Showbiz will be honoured to help the Pension Protection Fund fill the £571m black hole in the BHS pension scheme. Former BHS boss Philip Green – who, along with his family, collected around £580m from the stricken retailer he sold for £1 last year – has been a perennial Lost in Showbiz character. If this column had a Jazz Age, then he was its Great Twatsby, whose legendary parties I now see concealed a secret longing. Albeit one for shop assistants’ pay packets. And superyachts. He’s just bought a third superyacht.
Furthermore, Sir Phil intersected with so many of our other favourites: Mr Simon Cowell, his lordship Suralan Sugar, failed drummer turned jazz-mag magnate Richard Desmond … We shall reminisce about those epochal alliances shortly.
“What is Truman trying to prove?” wondered Cecil Beaton rhetorically of Mr Capote’s fabled Black and White Ball. “The foolishness of spending so much time organising the party is something for a younger man or worthless woman to indulge in, if they have social ambitions.” This, of course, is a moot point as far as Sir Phil’s well-publicised social extravaganzas have been concerned. Organised by his wife Tina – widely hailed as Monaco’s Mrs Dalloway – they included a bar mitzvah for his son Brandon, at which the hired entertainers included Beyoncé. Phil’s 55th, estimated to have cost £5m, saw 200-odd guests flown privately to a resort in Cyprus. They included a former Page 3 girl and Jeremy Beadle.
By the time of his 60th – cost approximated at £6m – Sir Phil had gone up in the world of celebrity, and the guestlist for a four-day Mexico shindig boasted Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell, Kate Hudson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Moss, Ronnie Wood, Cowell, and various others whose personal consumption over the course of the weekend amounted to more than an average BHS worker’s annual pension. Paparazzi photos show revellers wearing PG60-branded regalia, recalling the hen weekend fashion that was le dernier cri at the time.
As for Philip’s putative 65th birthday celebrations, I’m not even going to joke that they will be held in HMP Ford, with catering provided by the best the commissary has to offer. Even though people are calling for him to be stripped of his knighthood, there is no suggestion that he has acted illegally. As the Financial Times, which calls on Sir Phil to make up the full £571m gap, wearily observes [paywall]: “The BHS story is a case study in many unpopular aspects of modern capitalism: exploitation of limited liability, loophole-ridden tax law and intricate accountancy.”
But I think we may assume that we have passed the era of peak guestlist, and that at least some of Phil’s close personal friends from the world of showbiz will be moved to stay away when he reaches the milestone next year, finding themselves burdened with an unavoidable charity engagement that weekend.
And so to some of our Green-hued highlights down the years. There was the landmark joint interview Sir Phil gave to GQ with his friend Simon Cowell, in which the pair kept referring to “our capability”, in the manner of an independent nuclear state. They announced – yet oddly never delivered on – a new joint enterprise that would control all the rights to Cowell’s programming. Philip liked the name “Growl” for this, though they hadn’t set that in stone. During dinner with the GQ reporter, someone texted Phil to ask if they were buying ITV. “We could do it,” he cackled. “That’s the difference,” explained Simon to the interviewer. “A year ago, I think I would have been interested, just out of ego. Now I sit with him and not only could we do it, we could make a massive difference.” Poor ITV, I thought at the time. My love for it will still be strong, after these boys of summer have gone.
Fortunately, they never got their way with the old girl, while plans for X Factor theme parks, and to make Caesar’s Palace the permanent global home of the karaoke show, have also bafflingly yet to materialise. Cowell likened Green to “one of those guys from the 30s … Louis Mayer”. To which the only sensible response is: Hahahahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. But thanks to our stack-heeled Irving Thalberg for the insight.
As for Phil’s relations with other wannabe celebrity businessmen, a notable passage in Richard Desmond’s autoparodic autobiography sees the Express owner claim he was first choice to helm The Apprentice when the format came to the UK. He tried to palm it off on Sir Phil, who also turned it down, but suggested their friend Suralan Sugar. Desmond lamented Sugar’s failure to give him and Green “sufficient credit” for his celebrity elevation.
Sugar has another walk-on in the Green story, shortly after the Topshop boss was made “efficiency tsar” by David Cameron in 2010, and produced a Ladybird report into government waste. As he glossed: “If I ran my business like this, the lights would be out.” Well now. Sir Phil not only conceived of the vast apparatus of the state as somehow analogous to retail, advising things such as late payment to suppliers, but appeared to unwittingly out himself as a Marxist, calling for “a mandate for central procurement”. And who should be this central procurer? According to his maiden speech to the Lords, none other than Alan Sugar.
Can it really be goodbye to all that? The fall of Sir Phil from the public tastes will certainly leave a black hole in this column’s content scheme, and I seek suggestions as to how to make up the shortfall at your earliest convenience.
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