BHS: The deals may well be fishy, but the really big catch is still to come

The alarm goes off. 5am. In the dark you scrape the ice off the car windscreen, or traipse shivering into town in the dark to catch the first bus. 6am. You roll up the shutters, open the cages in the stockroom and start putting the morning’s delivery out on to the shelves. For ten hours you’ll be on your feet, standing around or rushing about, without phone, without email, without so much as the latest cat meme for distraction. It’ll earn you £60. By the end of the month, your take home pay will be about £1,000. Such is a typical life in retail.

Here’s a less typical one. You used to be a racing driver but that didn’t work out so you go into business, go bankrupt a couple of times, then meet a rotund tanned man on his yacht. Someone lends you £35m to make you look rich. You buy BHS for a quid, then you accidentally bankrupt it while seemingly trying to strip it of its assets and 11,000 lives of the type described above are wiped out in an instant.

This is the potted history of the accusations facing Dominic Chappell, the man who bought BHS from “Sir” Philip Green, in advance of his appearance in front of the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee on Wednesday morning.

It was always going to be a difficult day for Dominic Chappell. And then the company’s financial advisor called him “a Sunday pub league retailer but a Premier League liar” in Wednesday's select committee, and the CEO said Chappell“owned a gun and had threatened to kill him”.

Such things get people’s attention. They don’t get people’s jobs back but they do get people’s attention. For a full three hours, claim and counter claim flew around. Darren Topp, the old CEO, said he’d said that and then said this. Michael Hitchcock, the financial advisor who’d been brought in to act as de facto CFO because Chappell hadn’t appointed one.

Chappell denied he’d threatened to kill anyone (though this denial had to come later. On his way out into the street, the question was shouted by a journalist as no one on the committee had deigned to bring it up).

It was the sort of shabby little row that, had it been conducted by a group of uniformed twenty-somethings in the BHS bedding section on any given high street, would have seen them all having their zero hour contracts terminated in a flash. In the rather more rarefied atmosphere of a parliamentary committee hearing, it just showed in vivid, middle-aged, tie-wearing, corporate speaking splendour how BHS had no chance from the second Chappell turned up.

A loan there. Assets here. A property purchase there. A cheeky £1.5m wafting on and off the books. The sort of bedevilling detail that BHS’s 11,000 staff couldn’t possibly hope to understand, other than the naked fact that their grand-a-month payslips aren’t landing on their doormat anymore.

Chappell maintains he put a deal together to sell BHS to Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley, who accidentally confirmed as much to the same committee on Tuesday – though his PR advisor sitting next to him told him not to. That deal never happened. Chappell claims Philip Green prevented it from happening. And that whenever the subject of the £500m company pension pot was raised, Green would become “furious”.

“Philip went absolutely crazy, screaming and shouting down the phone that he didn't want to get involved with Mike Ashley,” Chappell said.

Then Green recalled a £35m loan to the company and all was lost. It was, Chappell said, “avoidable”. He’s a cleaner fish, of course, Chappell. The Green whale will swim before the committee next week. And you can bet he’ll be asked a lot about the company pension pot. He might very well get instantly furious. Won’t get anyone their job back though.