Tesco: Lewis' early start shows scale of problems - James Ashton

New chief executives are keen to hit the ground running, but marathon man Dave Lewis’s legs are pounding away and he hasn’t even found his way to the corner office yet.

That he is being pressed into service a month early is both a sign of the scale of Tesco’s crisis and the supermarket group’s eagerness to tackle it.

Shareholders are always pressing boards to act more decisively, so Tesco chairman Sir Richard Broadbent is conserving as much cash as possible for Lewis to throw at the company’s escalating woes.