He can expect another call from Sir Philip soon
Posted in General on 23. Jul, 2010
He can expect another call from Sir Philip soon.If he finds the time, that is. Sir Philip and his tight-knit management team have spent the past few months working on the Carpet Depot format which will be expanded aggressively.Carpet Depot is a huge, warehouse-style store that stocks carpets starting at prices as low as pounds 1.19 a square yard and up to around pounds 50. The party’s troublesome overdraft is down to less than pounds 10m, he says.A skilled persuader, Sir Philip was thought to have been instrumental in securing a pounds 4m interest-free loan from Graham Kirkham, the wealthy head of DFS furniture, last year. As deputy chairman of the party’s treasury committee he is helping to build a pounds 22m fighting fund at Central Office for the next election. John Major and his wife, Norma, were guests at his villa in the south of the France over the summer.He says: “The economy is improving all the time. Unemployment is coming down and we have a government that is listening.
I think the 5,000 more policeman on the beat is very exciting.”Earlier this year he was taking pounds 5 bets that the Tories would win the next election “I’d double that now,” he says. Asked why he had not gone to Dayton himself, he said, “It was not important who took part .. We all think the same”. Mr Karadzic has been indicted for war crimes by the international tribunal at the Hague and is liable to arrest if he leaves the country.Yesterday mediators were to hold more talks with rebel Serbs in Croatia’s Eastern Slavonia region. A first effort by the US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, and the UN envoy, Thorvald Stoltenberg, to get the Serb and Croat sides together fell apart on Saturday when the Serb side failed to turn up.. PETER RODGERS
AND CHRISTIAN WOLMAR
Railtrack is fighting to make its flotation next year more attractive to the City by arguing it should be allowed to keep some of the profits it makes on property development, and pressing the Government not to retain a golden share that would allow ministers to block takeovers.The moves follow the disclosure in Saturday’s Independent that the Government is set to give the railways an additional subsidy of pounds 100m to cover the costs of Railtrack’s inability to keep services running on time.All three measures are seen as important to boosting the value of Railtrack when it is floated next April or May – after a long period in which City estimates of the company’s value have more than halved from an initial guess of as much as pounds 4bn.Under rail privatisation legislation, the company is due to hand any profits on property development back to the Government so they can be used to reduce the train operating companies’ track access charges.But Railtrack has told John Swift, the rail regulator, that there will be no incentive to develop trackside property if its shareholders do not receive a part of the action.Although British Rail kept a large number of properties in public ownership, Railtrack was handed a considerable amount of land needed for operational use of the railways, including the stations. His carpet business is on a roll and so too, he believes, is his other great love – the Conservative Party, for which he is a key fund- raiser.Carpets first. As the Axminster king of Britain, Sir Philip had already made one carpeting fortune when he secured pounds 70m from the sale of Harris Queensway in 1988.
Now 53, he is doing it all again with Carpetright, a rapidly expanding carpet group whose low prices and high volumes have helped it snatch a 14 per cent share of the UK carpet market.He is now rolling out a new larger format Carpet Depot with which he hopes to build the group’s share to 20 per cent.As for the Conservatives, Sir Philip has been enthused by the Tory Party conference and the recent dinner at Claridges to celebrate the 70th birthday of Baroness Thatcher, who awarded him his knighthood in 1985 He has continued his top-level connections. Sir Philip Harris is sitting in the boardroom of his company’s head office in Rainham, Essex, but finding it difficult to stay still. “What do you think of this design then? See what we’ve done with these signs We’ve really perked them up with a bit of yellow … mmm,” he adds, agreeing with himself.
He talks quickly with the enthusiasm of the born salesman and is in bouncy form. All this makes a small base rate cut much less risky than it seemed a few months ago.. More importantly, the PMI figures on delivery times suggest producer output price inflation will drop sharply in the early part of next year.
This increases the likelihood that retail price inflation will peak by the middle of 1996.Fourth, the Cabinet seems to have reached agreement last week on public spending plans for 1996/97, which will roughly freeze the real total of spending for another year.Though these plans will be hard to hit in a pre-election period (much harder than the Tory Party seems to imagine), they should ensure that the fiscal stance will tighten next year, even after pounds 3bn of tax cuts. The US talks, said Mr Karadzic, should involve the return of part of this territory.Mr Milosevic, the Bosnian President, Alija Izetbegovic, and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia are studying a series of documents that international mediators hope will form the basis of a peace accord.Mr Karadzic said previous peace conferences on ex-Yugoslavia had failed because they lacked US support. The prices component of the PMI dropped from 57.5 in September to 52.5 in October, the lowest reading since November 1993, which would be consistent with an easing in producer input price inflation towards zero in coming months. In fact, earnings have risen only 3.5 per cent, a difference which might indicate a structural break for the better.Third, several lead indicators for price inflation have started to improve sharply, even though the recorded inflation rate continues to rise. So it is far from clear that their view has been fully vindicated.Nevertheless, several factors have tipped the argument on base rates in the optimists’ favour, at least for a while.