Jim Armitage: BHS staff need a buyer, not brickbats, for ‘big bad Phil’

The MPs on the Business and Work and Pensions select committees visibly shivered with excitement when Goldman’s Antony Gutman dropped his little bomb in Sir Philip Green’s lap.

As Arcadia’s informal advisers, Gutman declared, we told them months before they sold BHS that this Chappell fellow was a wrong ’un. Kaboom!

So far, the impression from the Green camp has been that Chappell’s failure as an owner of the business was a bolt from the blue. That can’t now be the case.

You can see why the MPs were pleased.

Not only did they prove that, but they ascertained the brainy Arcadia chairman, Lord Grabiner QC, was not even at the key meeting where the sale to Chappell was discussed. Clearly, the MPs are showing, Green called the shots at BHS. The coming days’ evidence will doubtless show he ran it on a fuel of instinct and ego without the checks and balances a business of that scale required.