Retail royalty: The Grocer meets Mary Portas

He wants to make society “big”, whatever that means.

Just last month he said he’d make the next decade “the most entrepreneurial and dynamic” in British history. Now David Cameron wants to save the High Street. The PM’s certainly got a lot on his plate.

But he’s hoping for a little help from his chums. Oh, and Mary Portas. That’s right, The Grocer can reveal that TV’s ‘Queen of Shops’ is to turn government advisor on the problem of helping out our High Street retailers.

She’s got her work cut out. Just this week Deloitte warned that 2011 will see the steepest fall in disposable incomes in 140 years, with households an average of £780 worse off. So what can be done?

Make the supermarkets pay, says Portas. “What would be so wrong if out of all the millions in profit that Tesco makes every minute they were to put a percentage back into developing local community high streets?” she fumes, showing more than a trace of the tempestuousness she’s known for on the telly. “Consumers are starting to expect big businesses to support our towns, as opposed to just driving in. Why would that be so difficult to do?”

It’s a drum she’s banged before. Just a few weeks ago Portas attacked Tesco on Twitter for its “greed” after it opened its 18th store in Bristol. The Stokes Croft opening went on to spark a riot in which the store was petrol-bombed. Not that the Queen of Shops would ever condone such behaviour. In fact, she seems to have rethought her previously hard line on Britain’s biggest retailer.

“It’s not greed,” she says. “Of course the basis of any commercial retail business is to open as many stores and sell as much as you can, but I do feel the multiples should try and listen to consumers a lot more. Of course I don’t support people trashing shops in Bristol, but it does show that they feel Tesco is overrunning their town.

“This is not about me being ‘anti-big’ I’m absolutely not. Tesco has done an awful lot in terms of employment and many other things to raise the bar but I believe they’ve reached saturation. If they came to local towns and worked with independents and helped maintain high streets, that would be a very powerful thing.”

That all sounds fine in theory, but the devil will be in the detail. And details are a rare commodity today. It’s early days, she says, adding that the following months between filming her new TV series (“It’s out in September and will be very different”), running her own marketing agency and working as a retail consultant will be spent thrashing out the details of her rescue plan. Whatever form it takes, Portas promises it’s going to be big.

“It has to be, doesn’t it?” she says. “I don’t know the answer yet but I hope I will in the next six months. It has to start with the government and local councils. If they continue not to act, soon we will have tumbleweed rolling down our high streets. We’ll be looking at the new shape of our high streets, something that is more social, with meeting spaces and diversity. We need a new business model.”

Co-ordinated initiatives by local retailers such as joint delivery or loyalty schemes are one way the high street’s fortunes could be reversed, suggests Portas. She adds that struggling independents should weigh up all the options available to them if they are to survive, pointing to symbol groups such as P&H’s Mace chain as one way smaller players can gain greater buying power (in fact, she’s at P&H’s Pro-retail 2011 this Tuesday and Wednesday).

“I think it’s a great business formula,” she says. “I find it really interesting that you can be an independent retailer and keep your own point of view grow your own veg or bake your own cakes but still have the support of a big brand that will help you compete with the big boys.”

Of course the big boys only want to get bigger so it seems highly unlikely they or their shareholders for that matter will agree to sacrifice any of that growth for the sake of the little guy. Still, Portas is adamant that the behemoths of British retail will have a pivotal role to play in breathing new life into the country’s town centres.

As she envisions “the big boys helping the little boys,” it sounds suspiciously a lot like a euphemism for clobbering big business with yet more tax, just as the economy is facing the biggest contraction in disposable income in generations. Of course Portas wouldn’t be the first to prescribe such a measure.

Last month the ResPublica thinktank, whose founder Philip Blond has close links with Cameron, published a report recommending that supermarkets should be taxed to support traditional high street shops. However the ‘T’ word is one that Portas baulks at.

“Behave. Now you’re putting words in my mouth,” says Portas. “We need to look at specific codes and rent rebates for the small so they grow and that has to be done in line with the big businesses. It doesn’t help when we have small businesses stuck with double yellow lines outside their shops and Tesco with planning permission for the car park just down the road.

“Consumers are starting to realise that if we don’t do something to save our high streets we will lose the heart and soul of our towns. If you have a Tesco Metro move into your town and everything around it starts to close down, how are you going to feel about your town? Not brilliantly. We need to develop a good mix on the high street. People think it’s impossible but I don’t think it is.”

It’s another question whether the supermarkets will want to play ball with Portas. After all she has described Tesco as being staffed by “faceless mutes” and blamed the multiples for ending the era of Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. But she’s nothing if not determined.

“I know this sounds like a utopia but we do need to think very carefully about how this can be done,” she says. “Why can’t we have an ideal world? We need one don’t we? Change needs to come. I’m working with the government because this is what I believe we need to do.”

Of course Portas may have other attractions for Cameron and chums. Her TV series have attracted millions of viewers and she’s got a public profile that any politician would sell his grandmother for. And Cameron wouldn’t be the first PM to cosy up to a celebrity in the hope that some of their popularity would rub off on them. Alan Sugar was elevated from Sir to Lord as he was given the job of ‘enterprise tsar’ by Gordon Brown, as the soon-to-be-ex-PM tried to claw back some credibility before the general election.

So what’s the former Harvey Nichols creative director going to be tsar of? Will it be Dame Mary Portas in the not-too-distant future? “I’m not after a peerage. You can write that,” she snaps.

And we believe. After all, you don’t need to be a dame when you’re already a queen.