John Lewis’s new angler will need to get creative if he is to reel in a rescue

Jason Tarry, a fishing obsessive, has apparently spent the summer casting lines into streams. From this month, when he succeeds Dame Sharon White as chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, he will be able to indulge in his favourite pastime at the Leckford Estate in Hampshire, which was bought by the retail mutual in 1929 and offers 11 miles of fly-fishing on the River Test.
That almost wasn’t the case. White considered selling the Leckford Estate but had to back down when she ran into internal resistance, just as she did with the far bigger idea of trying to change John Lewis’s employee-owned status and bring in an external investor.
I start with the issue of John Lewis workers’ access to rainbow trout because it goes to the heart of the immense challenge Tarry is about to inherit. The 33-year Tesco veteran needs to revive two well-loved but flagging businesses, one of which — the eponymous department store group — has been the victim of a dramatic, and probably irreversible, shift in consumer behaviour. He has to do so within the envelope of its unusual structure, which limits its ability to raise equity and grants “partners” unusual perks. And he arrives after a period when unfocused leadership has sapped finances and morale. A not untypical recent letter to The Gazette, the in-house magazine, complained about White’s frequent media appearances on shows such as the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
There is some low-hanging fruit — or fish close to the surface. Scrapping a move into property development and a target of building 10,000 rental homes would help concentrate attention on the core problem — trading. You’d imagine that Tarry, who was put in charge of sorting out Tesco’s commercial policies after its 2014 supplier income scandal and then ran its stores in the UK and Ireland, will quickly get to grips with Waitrose, where market share losses in any case seem to have stabilised.
But the remaining 34 department stores are the ground zero of the John Lewis meltdown. It no longer passes the basic test that can be applied to legacy businesses — if it didn’t exist, would you invent it today? It is where the cocktail of shoppers’ migration online and reactive cost-cutting has taken its harshest effect, with declining service standards further reducing the incentive to visit stores, fuelling a downward spiral. Sales fell by 4 per cent to £4.8 billion last year, which is worse than it sounds given that inflation averaged almost 8 per cent.
John Lewis has struggled even while benefiting from the demise of competitors such as Debenhams. Tarry, who worked his way up through Tesco’s general merchandise business, may close more stores and orientate the surviving ones towards items customers tend to want to touch, such as bedding and furniture. But in the words of a supportive former colleague: “Even if you put the messiah in there, I’m not sure you’d bet on success.”
White, a former civil servant, proved too philosophical for the rough retailing conditions that have engulfed the partnership. With Tarry, an Arsenal fanatic who failed his maths GCSE, the pendulum has swung hard in the other direction. He is a veteran trader who told The Grocer magazine in 2015 that “nothing from a technical perspective or skills basis fazes me”.
There are two questions. Tesco, with its ferocious work culture and fixation on shareholder value, is about as far removed as you can get from John Lewis’s genteel traditions. Will Tarry, 57, have the capacity and patience to persuade his often voluble new colleagues to take difficult decisions? And any turnaround of the department store group will require creative and lateral thinking, not just trading nous. Tarry should get the basics right; one headhunter says he will “get the trains to run on time”. But does the partnership’s seventh chairman also have the strategic breadth to ensure that he doesn’t end up being its last? We’re about to find out whether he has what it takes to reel in the industry’s most tricksy fish.
Telegram’s founder says the messaging app’s logo — a white paper aeroplane — symbolises a “free entity” unconstrained by boundaries. The mobile digital era’s radical connectivity has challenged concepts of sovereignty, as well as old industries such as retail and media. While globalisation in terms of physical trade has been in retreat since 2008, a new breed of tech giant has come to care ever less about individual countries’ laws and customs. Elon Musk typified this attitude when he declared that “civil war is inevitable” during July’s UK riots.
Having long been outmanoeuvred by tech companies on tax, sovereigns are now biting back. Telegram’s Pavel Durov was constrained in France last weekend and charged with neglecting to address criminality on the app. Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, faces a ban in Brazil for not complying with a Supreme Court judge’s demands for information relating to alleged spreading of misinformation. The EU has charged X under its new Digital Services Act for failing to uphold the bloc’s social media standards.
Musk and his ilk are unpalatable, but there is a danger of state overreach. In any case, there will be many more arm wrestles to come.
Corporate raider Patrick Drahi always said the last assets he would get rid of were Sotheby’s and his stake in BT. He sold a minority share in the auction house last month and is offloading his 24.5 per cent of BT to Sunil Bharti Mittal.
The Financial Times reports that Sotheby’s earnings collapsed by 88 per cent before its deal with Abu Dhabi. Combined with pressures elsewhere in Drahi’s empire, it makes you wonder whether Mittal’s swoop on BT was really such a strategic investment — or whether it was simply an opportunistic bargain.
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