Cash or faith poser for investors

IT'S over, says Philip Green. Well, not quite - but it's looking that way. Shareholders in M&S now have a stark choice: stick with a management that is untested and untried at running their stores group but has a good reputation for extracting value from others; or go with a price undreamt of just a few weeks ago.

Put like that, there's little contest. Suddenly, chief executive Stuart Rose has really got to come up with the goods in next week's strategy review.

M&S is entitled to resist Green's offer. So far, for instance, he has been denied information about the size of the group's pension deficit, and M&S is well within its rights to do so. But such behaviour begins to look petty.

As Green has shown, the pensions row is an irrelevance: he wants to buy the house and he will have it - the owner not answering his questions about whose responsibility it is to maintain the garden fence won't make any difference.

Despite Green's confidence, he knows there is still a long way to go and several potential obstacles to surmount (the Competition Commission, for instance, may yet prove his undoing) but there's no doubting his desire.

He really has put money where his mouth is - and deserves to be taken seriously, by shareholders and the hitherto intransigent M&S board.