Marks & Spencer will this week unveil its lowest profit for eight years, underlining the scale of the job facing chief executive Marc Bolland and his team.
On Tuesday, it is tipped to report that underlying profits for the year to March fell seven per cent to £658million.
The fresh evidence of M&S’s troubles comes after a buoyant week in which its latest women’s range was welcomed by fashion pundits. rose seven per cent after the launch.
The retailer has reorganised its womenswear team and drafted in Belinda Earl, formerly of Jaeger and Debenhams, who will work up to three days a week on designs alongside another former Debenhams executive, Stephanie Chen.
But Earl’s plaudits from the fashion community sparked a bitter row with her former boss at Debenhams, Terry Green.
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Green, a veteran of the fashion retail world, contacted Earl last week to complain she was taking credit for the rescue of Debenhams and for introducing designer fashions at the department store.
Green, who was chief executive at Debenhams for nine years from 1991, told The Mail on Sunday that he drove the strategy and agreements with key designers to create in-house ranges.
He persuaded Jasper Conran and John Rocha to join Debenhams in the late 1990s and later coined the term Designers at Debenhams.
Earl was head of the accessories division at the time the designer ranges were first established.
Green said: ‘For Belinda to insinuate or give the impression she is responsible for the turnround at Debenhams and the introduction of Designers at Debenhams is disingenuous and factually incorrect.’
Earl declined to comment, but she has said privately that she has never sought to take credit and that others have made the inference.
However, Green said he thought Earl’s strategy at M&S was ‘the right one’.