De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Mike Ashley is not an aberration of British capitalism. He is the norm.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Mike Ashley, a billionaire retailer, is more synonymous with a £6 ($8) Slazenger t-shirt than a £6,000 Saint Laurent leather jacket. After buying Harvey Nichols, with its flagship Knightsbridge department store, earlier this month, Mr Ashley commands an empire that does both. The deal would be easy to ignore. At £40m, the Harvey Nichols sale is a tiddler. With a net worth of £3.4bn, Mr Ashley is far from Britain’s richest man. Frasers, the retail conglomerate that he built from a single sportswear shop in Maidenhead, does not quite creep into the ftse 100. Yet Mr Ashley, more than any other figure, has come to personify the state of British capitalism, for good and ill.
To understand how, leave „Harvey Nicks”, hop on a Lime bike and pedal ten minutes up Piccadilly. Stop outside Lillywhites, a department store on Regent Street, Britain’s grandest shopping street. What was once an imposing old Victorian sports emporium that sold equipment is today in effect a branch of Sports Direct, the discount sportswear store that made Mr Ashley rich. In it piles of polyester shirts at 70% off are sold alongside £6 „beer pong” sets, where Lillywhites once sold croquet mallets.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
At Sports Direct Mr Ashley performed retail alchemy, turning polyester into billions. How did he manage it? Hammering suppliers, cheap labour and lousy working conditions. „We have it described to us as a gulag, as Victorian, as a workhouse, not a warehouse,” one union wallah told a parliamentary inquiry in 2016. A sheepish Mr Ashley appeared before mps, promising to undo the worst excesses. If he was guilty of anything it was giving people what they wanted: cheap goods. There is no period where working in a warehouse was well-paid, dignified work. Do you want five pairs of Slazenger socks for £4 or not?
Poor management is often cited as a British malaise. In some ways, Frasers is an exception. Sports Direct, the group’s cash cow, is a ferociously well-run business to the chagrin of its critics. In others, it is an illustration of a lack of professionalism. Head to the Horse and Groom, a pub just north of Regent Street, to consider how. It was in here that a Sports Direct adviser claimed Mr Ashley agreed to pay a £15m bonus if the group’s share price hit £8. When it duly did, Mr Ashley argued any agreement should not be taken seriously given how much booze had been drunk. („I’m a power drinker,” said Mr Ashley on the stand.) The executive argued this was par for the course in Mr Ashley’s meetings, recalling one event where Mr Ashley drank so much he puked into a fireplace, cheered on by colleagues. Mr Ashley won. Laments about British management gained another data point.
Since then, Mr Ashley’s company has engaged in a hyperactive buying spree. And so a walk up Regent Street is a walk across his empire. That Burberry store? Mr Ashley controls about 4% of Britain’s only truly global luxury brand. He also owns just over a third of Mulberry, an expensive handbag company, whose shop is across the road. Hugo Boss? Mr Ashley upped his stake to 48% of the prominent German label. Frasers is less a retailer than a sort of hedge fund for people who want a mishmash of retail stocks bought on a whim. Call it adhd Capital. What do Mr Ashley’s investors have to show from this hyperactivity? In 2014 Sports Direct was worth a bit over £4bn. In 2026, after a decade of frantic activity, it is worth a bit under £4bn. For all his riches, Mr Ashley is a symbol of British stagnation.
But then this is typical of Britain’s best-known billionaires. A scroll through the Sunday Times rich list is a rundown of Bollygarchs, dukes and wheeler-dealers made good, like Mr Ashley. Among them are a few more successful entrepreneurs such as Nik Storonsky, founder of Revolut, a bank and one of the rare giants to have emerged in Britain in the past decade or so. Unlike America, Britain is far from the frontier of capitalism and its billionaires reflect that. For now, British capitalism is still better represented by Mr Ashley and his kind rather than any tech company.
Bluntly, Britain is less rich than it thinks it is. Put it another way: British billionaires are so broke they can barely afford Britain’s trophy assets. The country’s most valuable ones are now out of reach for humble billionaires like Mr Ashley. He owned Newcastle United for 14 years, in which the club won nothing and was relegated (twice). Only oil states and American billionaires can afford to take a run at the Premier League. Mr Ashley sold Newcastle to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund in 2021; the club won its first major trophy in decades four years later.
Instead, Mr Ashley is left bargain-hunting, picking up ostensibly luxury brands at poundshop prices, including the struggling Harvey Nichols. Turn off Regent Street and head to 1 Savile Row. Here stands Gieves & Hawkes, a tailor that dates back to the 18th century and fitted up Horatio Nelson. It has been part of Mr Ashley’s stable since 2022. Britain struggles to create new icons. All it can do is sell off its old ones to the highest bidder. Increasingly those bids are not high at all: Mr Ashley paid so little for Gieves & Hawkes it did not require a stock-market update.
It is fashionable to believe that Britain would be better off without Mr Ashley, an entirely self-made man who contributes hundreds of millions to the exchequer each year by selling things people want. Yet for all that Mr Ashley personifies some of the failures of British capitalism, Britons have little choice but to hope for his future success. Few others are so invested in the country’s high streets, least of all the country’s shoppers: Britons will do anything to keep their high streets alive other than actually visit them. And so, come 2040, if an aged Mr Ashley is worth many multiples of his pile, Britain will be in a much better place. Britain may not much like Mr Ashley, but it does need him to flourish.
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