Can Rose make Marks blossom?

THERE'S A WORD to describe new Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Rose. Terry Green, his old mucker from Burton,says Rose is 'nice, charming and ruthless'.

That's three. He certainly is all of those. But Rose, in a word? Poised. Not posed - despite his fastidious appearance and sometimes solicitous manner, there's no hint of him putting on an act. Poised. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thus: 'Poised, adj. 1 composed, self-assured. 2 (often followed by for, or to +infin.) ready for action.'

When he walks into a room, Rose ensures everyone gets a name check, a nod, a squeezed handshake. Eye contact is firm, his smile ready but pursed. In a group of suited businessmen and women, he stands out. Even with their formal clothes, they manage to look scruffy alongside him.

Everything about him is just so. From his carefully brushed steel grey hair, to his eyebrows, to his chin (he always looks as though he's only just shaved), to his tightly knotted, not-too-loud tie and buttoned-up collar. His suit is grey, pressed, expensive. His shoes are black and seemingly newly polished.

He's tall, his frame is spare, he obviously keeps himself trim. Chuck in his green eyes and you have the sort of middle-aged, successful smoothie some women go for - although to describe him as a 'corporate Pierce Brosnan', as one female writer did, is probably going too far.

But he's definitely the sort of chap, with his wife and two children, who would look fine modelling a new range of suits at...M&S.

The same could also be said of his predecessor, Roger Holmes. But whereas Holmes can come across as serious and weighed-down, Rose is altogether lighter. He has all the confidence of someone who has been there, done that - and has the millions in the bank to prove it.

Within retailing, Rose enjoys a very different status to that of Holmes. The latter was always a bit of an unknown, a management consultant who fell into buying and selling, who was probably good at sorting out the organisational side of M&S but less sure at voicing an opinion on the new womenswear range.

Wining and dining

ROSE is everything that Holmes is not. After school, he started as a trainee at M&S. He hadn't wanted to go to university - much to the annoyance of his mother, who wanted him to be a doctor - and worked straightaway.

He has always desired money and always had high tastes. He keeps impressive wine cellars at his homes in Westminster and Suffolk. He pilots his own plane from Biggin Hill, takes luxury holidays in Barbados and France, and prefers exclusive restaurants.

Asked what motivates him, Rose responds: 'Money and success.' He's been like that since way back. Left £3,000 in a will in his late teens, he blew the lot on wining and dining and on new clothes. A love of splurging at first seems out of character in one so outwardly careful, but delve deeper and it becomes clearer.

When you meet him, Rose does seem different from your average successful businessman. He's not a slap-you-on-the-back rugger bugger; he's more refined, quite foreign, almost - which is what he is.

His mother was of Scottish, English and Greek extraction, born in Egypt to a family of cotton traders. She came to England as a teenager and met his father, a Russian. His father's parents fled Russia after the Revolution and headed for China. Eventually his father was looked after, in England, by a Quaker spinster.

Changing his name from Bryantzeff, he did war service in the RAF, joined the Colonial Office and worked as a civil servant in Tanzania. The young Stuart grew up on the idyllic beaches of East Africa but that ended abruptly in his early teens when the family returned to England and he was sent to his father's old Quaker boarding school in York.

He resented the decision, not least because the fees left the family overstretched. His exam results weren't great and he left without a career in mind. He had inherited a love of good clothes from his mother (she had 'very good taste, she would have made a wonderful rich woman', he once said). He adds that she also gave him confidence by telling him she believed in him.

After coming to London and spending the £3,000 legacy, he needed to work. He got a job at the BBC but didn't like it. Then he secured a place at M&S, on its graduate programme (it's a measure of how confident he was that he wasn't a graduate). He fitted in with his quiet, refined air but he wasn't especially wedded to M&S.

Defining moment

ThAT all changed, he readily admits, when he was 24 and his mother committed suicide. It was the defining moment of his life. 'I was a merchandiser at M&S, very happy-go-lucky, I didn't take my career seriously. I think I came into work the following week and thought f*** this, I really am going to get on in life.'

Ever since, there's been an element of doing well for his mother, of pushing himself on to an extent, he has said, that made him seem 'overly pushy'. No matter: he climbed the ranks of M&S, working up to be a senior executive in Paris.

Even so, it wasn't far enough. He has always admitted to feeling his face didn't quite fit at M&S in those days. He was a 'bit arrogant and a bit cocky'. So, he jumped ship and joined Ralph Halpern's Burton.

It was not the sort of move senior M&S managers made. They tended to look down on the rest of the industry, particularly brash, cheap Burton. No sooner had he left than he wanted to return, so convinced was he that he'd made a terrible mistake. But he stayed and discovered a different side to working, away from M&S.

That company's top-heavy management stifled initiative, certainly among the lesser ranks. At Burton, which lost Halpern soon after Rose's arrival and was in the throes of crisis, he found a freedom to operate that had hitherto been denied him. He became one of a triumvirate, along with John Hoerner and Terry Green, sorting out what Rose describes as 'a pile of s***'.

Then when, the time came to demerge Burton into Arcadia and Debenhams, Hoerner got Arcadia, Green got Debenhams and Rose got nothing.

Jury was out

HE found out from the bankers. He was livid and he and Hoerner had an almighty row. It taught him to look after number one, that nobody else will take care of you - and it left him very sore.

It also put a question mark against him - why hadn't he got one of the jobs? The feeling was that while he was a good schmoozer and a great corporate salesman, he was not a roll-your-sleeves-up, get-stuck-in retailer. Green said of Rose that he had 'fabulous front' but the jury was still out on whether he could 'cut it as a trader'.

The truth was Rose didn't quite fit in. By his own admission, he's something of an outsider. One of them had to go and it was him.

He was then offered the top job at WH Smith, only to have that offer withdrawn after the board changed its mind. He was on his own. He used an office supplied by a friend and called in contacts. Eventually, in a move being echoed today, he was brought in by Argos to mastermind a defence against GUS. He failed but walked away with £540,000 for three months' work.

Next stop was cash-and-carry group Booker, where he stayed two years, merging it with Iceland before leaving with £2.84m in pay and options.

He went back to Arcadia, infuriating the then-boss of Iceland, Malcolm Walker, who said that flash Rose wasn't keen to work in Cheshire - Iceland's base - because there wasn't a Harry's Bar. His return to Arcadia was tinged with a large dose of 'I told you so, if only you'd appointed me in the first place...'

In just three years, Arcadia had become a terrible mess, Hoerner had left, the group was losing £152m a year and had debts of £260m, and the shares had slumped to 38p from 500p.

He implemented Brand Max - Hoerner's rescue plan before he was removed in a boardroom coup - to cut space and non-performing brands, and reduce stock levels. The results were spectacular. Profits returned, the shares soared to 400p and Philip Green offered to buy the business for £770m.

Rose netted £25m in the deal, or about £1m for every month he was in the job. Some in the City felt he could have held out for more later, when Arcadia had truly turned the corner. As it was, he sold and Green went on to make even more millions.

Rose and Green are friends but they are poles apart. Green is the rough diamond the M&S board can't abide; Rose is the well-turned-out gem who has to prove there's substance behind the sparkle.

Today, after another boardroom coup, Rose finds himself in an office vacated by Holmes and, doubtless, also filled with rescue plans. He may succeed, he may fail. Either way, he has done his poor mum proud.