Algemeen·NRC·29 aug

Britain needs better billionaires

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.