Marks and Spencer follows the England Football team off a cliff

Even the usually reliable food business hasn't saved chief executive Steve Rowe's blushes

Sales at the Clothing & Home division at M&S were down by nearly 9% (Getty)

Usually when M&S puts out bad numbers the food business is there to save its blushes. “Just look at how well our food business is doing in the middle of the grocers’ battle royale, and we charge premium prices too,” has been the message.

Not this time. Oh sure, a sales fall of just under 1 per cent at stores open at least a year isn’t bad given food prices have been falling across the board forcing grocers to run ever faster just to stand still.

But when M&S chief executive Steve Rowe puffed out his chest and declared the division “continued to strongly outperform a deflationary market” he really was clutching at straws.

It’s a mark of how badly he needed straws to clutch at. Sales at the all important Clothing & Home division (which includes the womenswear by which M&S is judged) were down by nearly 9 per cent.

Even though the City wasn’t expecting much, that’s just plain awful even by M&S’s recent standards.

It puts the retailer in the same stadium as the England football team when they faced Iceland in their doomed quest to reach the Euro 2016 quarter finals.

It looks even worse when you consider that the company wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders this time last year (sales came in flat).

The backdrop to this is Mr Rowe’s attempt to pep things up by reducing the number of promotions in favour, so we are told, of cutting prices across the board.

He says M&S has “re-priced” 1,000 lines and had just one “cyber day” instead of six.

Others have tried the same thing, piously declaring that they will offer customers better every day value, or some other such retail cliche.

It’s a nice idea in theory. It might even work in the customers’ favour. However, it ignores the fact that the punters quite like their promotions. Deals get people into shops, or onto websites.

Everyone has their eyes out for them, especially during uncertain times like those we’re currently living in.

Of course, uncertain times for Mr Rowe and his top team might mean a bit less bonus, and maybe putting off buying whatever over-priced toys they go in for for a couple of months.

For the rest of us they mean cutting back, stretching every penny, hunting around for deals and striking when they appear.

Or just keeping a close eye on those aisles of mad decisions at Aldi or Lidl. And yes, M&S shoppers can be found in Aldi and Lidl sometimes.

Those that have got any sense, at any rate. Why fatten the pockets of M&S shareholders if you don’t need to?

Those shares haven’t actually reacted too badly, but they’ve been sliding for some time and they’re in a five year trough, offering a prospective yield of nearly 7 per cent.

M&S shareholders seemed to have been reassured by Mr Rowe’s talk of “encouraging early signs”, his promise of improvement in sales and margins over the next 12 months and the fact that M&S is not changing its forecasts.

They’re giving him a pass. For now. Unfortunately for him, if Brexit has the impact many economists fear, he might have to change his tune quite quickly. As the new boy he’s on a longer leash than his predecessor Marc Bolland would have been on had he unveiled a dog’s dinner like this. But he’ll find it tightening quickly if his promises aren’t kept.