Send him a Carr

The BRC annual dinner attracted its best turnout of retail’s leaders for a good few years, with supermarket chiefs Justin King, Andy Clarke and Dalton Philips and JLP chairman Charlie Mayfield among the biggest names in attendance. The room felt busy too, and the evening was a fitting tribute to the hard and often thankless work done by Stephen Robertson and his team at the BRC in putting retail’s case in government and the wider world.

The BRC’s booming chairman Luke Mayhew made a forceful appeal for relaxation of regulation and recognition of retail’s economic value, and the earnest business minister Mark Prisk made a decent fist of responding. Originally Ken Clarke was due to be speaking and Prisk is no Ken Clarke, but he made the right noises and seemed genuinely serious about establishing a serious dialogue with the retail sector. Time will tell I suppose, but there was a degree of weary scepticism from the retailers sat around me, who gave the impression they’d heard it all before. Perhaps he’ll pleasantly surprise us though.

In the weird way of these events, he was followed on stage by Jimmy Carr, who isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He was exceptionally crude, which one or two people weren’t too impressed with, and certainly most of the jokes aren’t repeatable on a family blog like this. More than a few of them were recycled from when he did the Retail Week Awards a couple of years ago too. That said, I still laughed a lot and many others did too, Justin King chortling away particularly loudly..