Powering ahead

This morning we celebrated the launch of Retail Week’s 2010 Power List with a breakfast addressed by BBC Business Editor Robert Peston. Peston was a great speaker, clearly on top of his brief. He talked about the coalition government, and how he expects the severity of the cuts to come will put pressure on the Lib-Con alliance, and also how he thinks the consumer environment has changed forever as a result of the recession. He also said that the crisis in the Eurozone is more severe than widely thought, and that the impact of China has been underestimated, with the Chinese needing to spend more while the west needs to save more.

For the many top retailers in the room it wasn’t a positive tale, that’s for sure, but Peston - best known for breaking the story of the Northern Rock collapse - was robust in explaining his thinking and defending his journalism, when BRC director general Stephen Robertson asked him what he thought about criticisms from the previous government that his journalism had exacerbated the economic crisis.

The Power List is published with tomorrow’s magazine and will be here on the site too. The top two remain Sir Terry Leahy and Sir Philip Green, but below that there’s a lot of change, unsurprisingly given the turnover of management in the major retailers over the past year. Inevitably there are always a few people who are omitted - please don’t take it personally - and we’d love to hear your thoughts. We’ve set up a forum where you can tell us who we’ve forgotten, and who should be higher (or lower) in the list.