Arcadia’s results breakfast showed a side of Philip Green and his business which outsiders rarely see.

For many in retail the Arcadia Group and the boisterous persona of its owner Philip Green are interchangeable. But I saw a different side to both the man and his business yesterday, when George and I, along with journalists from the FT and Telegraph, were invited to the breakfast where he announced the company’s very decent results to its senior head office staff.

Alongside the pride with which Philip always talks about his business, there was a warmth and relaxed humour which you don’t always see publicly. He presented each of his top managers in turn with a jereboam of champagne, and praised the work of unsung functions like IT and logistics. He even had a laugh at the expense of Arcadia’s famously parsimonious chief executive Ian Grabiner, saying Grabiner had taken one of Green’s three phones off him because he had two others and was making £20-worth of calls on it a week.

There’s an assumption that Arcadia is a tough place to work because Philip and Ian have a reputation for being so demanding, which Philip acknowledged when he said “I’m sorry for the bad days.” Everyone knows he can sometimes fly off the handle, but a really telling fact for me is that the average length of service in Arcadia’s head office is 11 years, which I can’t imagine many retailers could match. You don’t get that length of service in a place people don’t enjoy working, and Green is acutely aware of and proud of the contribution of Arcadia’s 40,000-odd staff, and particularly the well-established senior team he has around him.

Sitting with Arcadia veterans like finance director Paul Budge and BHS boss Mike Goring was a reminder that there is a lot more to Arcadia than just its mercurial figurehead, and there’s tremendous loyalty to the business, to its brands, and to Green himself.