rince Philip. Philip May. Philip Hammond. Philip Hollobone. The Philippines. That Philips abound in David Cameron’s autobiography makes it all the more frustrating when you search for any references to Sir Philip Green, whom Cameron once favoured most out of all of the Philips. Philip Green, previously knighted by Tony Blair, was deferred to and esteemed to the point of his appointment in 2010 as the Cameron government’s “waste tsar”, both a national role model and specific rebuke to a civil service considered less able than the owner of Topshop and BHS (this was before he sold its carcass for £1 to an ex-bankrupt now in prison). Assisting Green in his corrective work was Ian Grabiner, his chief executive, whose name would later feature in a Commons joint report on the ruin of BHS. Its parent company, Taveta, had been run, it found, “as a personal fiefdom by a single dominant individual”. Well before Cameron courted Green, the retailer was known to have removed £1.2bn from BHS, avoiding an estimated £285m in tax by putting it in the name of (then) Mrs Green, a Monaco resident. And weeks after Green delivered his report, his biggest store was besieged by tax protesters from UKUncut. A spokesman for Arcadia called the blockade “highly irresponsible”. As much, with Arcadia now in administration, as Cameron’s reticence on Green is frustrating, he’s known to have struggled to confine his own achievements to 752 pages. There are only so many catastrophic mistakes you can explain away in a single memoir, especially if you want to keep in the bits about Eton and sport: “I briefly captained the Brasenose tennis team.” What with Murdoch, Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton, Michael Gove and so many other disappointments vying with Brexit for attention, maybe it’s unsurprising if the part where Cameron explains, with becoming regret, what he admired in an individual many others considered (given Green’s existing history of bullying, ugly extravagance and aversion to tax) insultingly unworthy of public office, had to be left in the shepherd’s hut. Perhaps we shouldn’t rule out further hard-earned lessons from the years of austerity explaining, for instance, why £5m toga parties may not be the compelling indicators of fiscal respectability they so often appear. Similarly, a retailer’s impressive contacts within the model community, such as Green’s well-advertised friendship with Kate Moss, may not invariably double as gold-standard qualifications for directing government policy. And in fairness, Cameron was recruiting advisers before the increased availability of Tory wives offered access to people of the calibre of Dido Harding. But it’s also possible that Cameron’s silence on Green’s disintegrating empire is attributable to the same loyalty that once made him describe the tsar’s scanty and unreferenced 33-page waste report as “very solid”. The superyacht enthusiast’s criticism on varying coffee prices struck him as “pretty chilling reading”. Though not perhaps as chilling, when you think what was ahead, as Green’s repeated exhortation to public servants to treat public funds “as your own”. In a memorable contribution to a parliamentary debate in which the fate of BHS was described as “one of the biggest corporate scandals of modern times”, Labour MP Iain Wright described Green’s approach to “his own” as follows: “He took the rings from BHS’s fingers, beat it black and blue, starved it of food and water and put it on life support and then he wanted credit for keeping it alive.” If Cameron has, like Blair and so many celebrity party guests, yet to speak up for his pal, the shopkeeper can surely rely for support on another old Tory colleague, Francis, now “Lord” Maude, who’s recently been resurrected for a new civil service efficiency project. Here’s how Maude anticipated, in 2010, the response from anyone aware of Green’s tax history: “We are extremely fortunate to have Sir Philip, with his immense commercial experience and of course his fantastic track record at managing large organisations, on board.” As nobody could deny that Green had, indeed, brazenly, albeit perfectly legally, avoided tax on £1.2bn, this approach differed more in detail than in principle from Trollope’s reflections on the tolerance for showy dishonesty that inspired his 1875 satire, The Way We Live Now, “so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable”. Maude’s colleague Michael Gove was yet more shamelessly in awe, describing the retailer in 2014 as a “sex god”. The occasion was the announcement of two-week work experience places, the better to show Green (who had resentfully been forced by the HMRC to pay his interns) in a more magnanimous light. As education secretary, Gove had made a special journey to introduce 800 or so north London sixth-formers to the celebrated bully and tax-avoider. “He’s the only person I know who has both Tony Blair and Kate Moss on speed-dial,” Gove told them. “And he is passionate about providing opportunities for young people.” And hardly less passionate, it later emerged, about selling BHS opportunities off for £1 to Dominic Chappell, despite the latter’s former bankruptcy and zero retail experience. As for Arcadia’s unfortunate pensioners, Gove, when interviewed, appears reluctant to agree that Green should maybe sell one of his yachts, to fix the latest deficit to have arisen in one of his pension schemes. Asked last week about the responsibilities of the passionate sex god whose talents he once promoted, Gove told BBC Breakfast: “I won’t get into personalities on this.” As with Cameron and, if he’s ever asked, Maude, you can see the difficulty. Either Gove admits fault for aligning himself so enthusiastically with the interests of a tainted retailer, for which he could hardly be exonerated, or, as seems to be his position, he effectively updates for the 2020s Trollope’s commentary on the degradation of public life, the way we live now.