Sketch: Sir Philip Green doesn’t want to blame anyone for the BHS collapse, but...

Businessman tells select committee: ‘If you look at the trustees, there have been some stupid, idiotic mistakes made’

Sir Philip Green during his appearance before the Business Select Committee

In my first ever science lesson at senior school, the first thing Ms Popperwell asked us to do was draw a picture of a scientist. Five minutes later, when 31 eleven year olds had all independently drawn a man in a white coat with a bald head and bushy back and sides, Ms Popperwell delivered her coup de grace that, no, scientists were everywhere, men, women, young, old, black, white, in labs, in offices, in universities, and so on.

I bring this up to make the point that lazy stereotypes are damaging and unfair, and in that vein it is important to point out that Sir Philip Green is not a spiv. But if for any reason you had to draw a picture of one, the chances of it deviating significantly from the vision that waddled into the Business Select Committee at 9.15 on Wednesday morning are slim indeed.

The orange skin, the silver streaks pulled tight over shiny pate and congregating in lacquered curls at the nape of the neck. To have been born in Croydon and to look every last inch the dubious Greek shipping magnate is no small achievement.

You can hardly blame Richard Fuller, MP for Bedford, for being quite so transfixed. We all were. There Sir Philip was, giving an entirely unprompted explanation of how he “doesn’t tell lies” when, all of a sudden, he’d swung his head in Fuller’s direction. “Do you mind not looking at me all the time,” he was suddenly semi-barking, from absolutely nowhere. “Do you just want to stare at me? It’s making me uncomfortable.”

As anyone who has ever ridden a bus after 9pm knows, this is standardised code for ‘I am about to beat you up.’ For the next six hours, the tone was set.

You probably already know that Sir Philip Green used to own BHS, then he sold it for a quid to a guy who’d been declared bankrupt three times, and now it’s gone into liquidation and the pension fund is down about £200m.

Sir Philip is, according to himself, a “big boy” and he’s “not running away” and he’s “not going to blame anyone.”

He’s “not going to blame anyone”, he made that very clear by saying it slightly over two hundred times. “But if you look at the trustees, there have been some stupid, idiotic mistakes made.”

He’s not going to blame anyone: “But unfortunately we sold it to the wrong guy.”

He’s not going to blame anyone, but: “There were very substantial fees paid to pension advisors.”

He’s not going to blame anyone, but: “Those are my wife’s accounts. I don’t have any control over those accounts.”

It was roughly on the hour mark that Sir Philip had properly relaxed into it. It was at this point that he had, I believe been either subtly or unsubtly rude to everyone on the committee. Karen Buck was “You lady over here.”

“You look better in your glasses,” he told Jeremy Quin. “Put your glasses back on.”

“Which bit of ‘don’t remember” is difficult for you to listen to?’ he told the octolingual Richard Graham.

As the barbs flew, Sir Philip developed a thoroughly delightful tick, of throwing furtive David Brent-style glances in the direction of the media, which was thoroughly flattering until it was our turn.

“All this press I’m reading every day that’s outrageous, and pretty rude,” he said, doing his little head turn again. We were duly scorned.

Still, who can blame him? Sir Philip was “not going to be bullied,” he made that clear, and in so doing dragged to new heights the surreal renaissance of that particular term. Sir Philip, one suspects, is as well acquainted with the wrong end of bullying as the Kim Jong dynasty.

He had, he said, “become immune to it all” after the traumas of the last five weeks, in which he “hasn’t even been able to visit my shops” but isn’t one of the 11,000 people made suddenly redundant from their mainly minimum wage jobs and being constantly informed about their vanishing pensions in the national press.

At 4pm, the committee finally rose, but not before its chair, Iain Wright, could deliver one final flourish. “We want to get much more detail on the structure of various companies, particularly those owned by Lady Cristina Green.”

So we can expect Sir Philip’s wife to be making an appearance soon too. Remember though, Sir Philip is a big boy, and he doesn’t want to blame anyone.