London's King of Retail Fashion, Brought Low by #MeToo
London’s King of Retail Fashion, Brought Low by #MeToo
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Philip Green in New York in 2014. He “would be slightly baffled by the way the machinery isn’t working the way it used to,” his biographer said.CreditCreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times
Among the purse-lipped patricians of Buckingham Palace, Sir Philip Green stood out a mile. With his gravelly London accent, his perma-tan and his rattail of white curls, he reveled in his role as the King of Retail Fashion, cursing a blue streak and flying in batches of supermodels for his birthday. His rages were mythic. Once, during a failed bid to buy Marks & Spencer, he was widely reported by the British press to have confronted the retail chain’s chairman outside his office, grabbed him by the lapels and yelled, “Oi! I want a word with you!”
Mr. Green’s ascent of Britain’s social ladder, made complete when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, was tainted this week after he became the latest high-profile target of sexual harassment claims. Mr. Green, 66, had used nondisclosure agreements to hush five former employees who accused him of sexual harassment and racist abuse. He then managed to secure an injunction, which remains in effect, to block publication of a monthslong investigation of those charges by a newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, at the estimated cost of $642,000 in legal fees.
But a plummy-voiced Labour peer, Baron Peter Hain, decided to defy the court order, invoking his parliamentary privilege to identify Mr. Green as the subject of the newspaper’s investigation. The revelation comes at an important moment in Britain, after the Harvey Weinstein case unleashed decades of sexual harassment accusations, and as Prime Minister Theresa May considers banning the legal practice of issuing nondisclosure agreements in such cases.
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His reputation began to corrode in 2016, when BHS went into bankruptcy shortly after he sold it for £1 to Dominic Chappell. The collapse put tens of thousands of jobs and pensions at risk. A parliamentary investigation branded this episode the “unacceptable face of capitalism” and was harsh in its criticism of Mr. Green.“We found little evidence to support the reputation for retail business acumen for which he received his knighthood,” it said in its conclusion. Many lawmakers voted for his knighthood, bestowed in 2006, to be rescinded, a rare procedure, but the threat was shelved when Mr. Green agreed to pay $466 million into the BHS pension plan. With the threat renewed in the last few days, few of his A-list friends have come forward in his defense. “This guy has gone from nowhere, to the very top, toward the bottom, very quickly,” said Stewart Lansley, an author of “Top Man: How Philip Green Built His High Street Empire.”
*******“He won’t be enjoying any of this, for sure,” Mr. Lansley said. “He doesn’t like negative publicity.” ****** (hmmm, does this sound like anyone we know????)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/world/europe/sir-philip-green-metoo.html
