Andy Bond has proven at Asda that he has the skills and experience to take on the top spot at Marks & Spencer, but would he take the role?

Now Justin King has ruled himself out of the race to be new chief executive of Marks & Spencer, the name of Asda’s Andy Bond is being mentioned in dispatches more and more.

That’s no surprise. Having run George and then Asda, Bond possesses that rarest of combinations, top level experience of running both food and non-food businesses.

He has also done a terrific job. The first time I met Bond in 2005 he had just taken over from Tony DeNunzio and his first task was to announce a major raft of redundancies. While it wasn’t in the dire straits that Morrisons and Sainsbury’s were at the time, there’s no doubt that Asda was underperforming and helping Tesco’s meteoric growth at the time.

Now Asda is on a fantastic roll and its underlying 8.4 per cent like-for-like growth for the past quarter beat even Morrisons. A recession does Asda no harm because of its strength on price, but even so the business has taken full advantage and has really responded to how consumers are feeling in the downturn.

The powers that be in Bentonville – where Bond is right now at Wal-Mart’s annual shareholders convention – have certainly recognised this. There has been a subtle shift from the company being a US business with stores abroad to being a global business that has its headquarters in the US, best illustrated by Asda marketing chief Rick Bendel’s elevation to a global role.

Increasingly Wal-Mart is looking to Leeds for inspiration and ideas on food retailing, and that’s because Asda is on a roll. Bond knows that, and while he may not show it as obviously as Justin King, he is highly driven and ambitious.

He is bound to be a name on M&S’s list of candidates and it might hold a strong lure. But is it a bigger job than running the best performing international unit of the world’s largest retailers? Many would argue it isn’t anymore. My hunch is that if one day he left Asda, it would be for something quite leftfield – I’m not sure the risk of taking on M&S and the challenges of taking on a giant, quoted company would be sufficiently tempting.

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