Curious silence of Philip Green’s celebrity friends

Dunbar’s Number suggests that 150 is around the maximum that it is possible, for the average person, to have as friends. For some reason, the businessman formerly known as Sir Philip Green has always seemed to be on a mission to disprove it. Phil’s Number, as we might call it, appears to be more like Jay Gatsby’s: limitless. As with his acquisition of shops and yachts, there really is no end, Green has repeatedly demonstrated, to the number of brand-new friends available to a determined person with a sufficiently attractive and compelling personality.

Photographs of the businessman, perhaps by design, tend to show him surrounded by friends, as impressive in quality as in quantity, and plainly thrilled, from their body language, to be in his company: there is a lot of hugging. In and around a Topshop show, for example, we might find Green pressed againstCressida Bonas, aged 26, the actress and former girlfriend of Prince Harry, prior to nestling alongside an old friend, Anna Wintour.

Ms Bonas has a career to think of, but I have often wondered, studying this annual outrage, just what makes the fabulously demanding Wintour willing to rub thighs with the world’s foremost manspreader. His signature look, a shirt unbuttoned to expose luxuriant chest hair, is not, perhaps, one calculated to impress the Vogue editor, even if it suggests one supremely comfortable in his own skin. On the other hand, the two share an interest in party-giving.

Wintour’s dedication to making her annual Met Gala an unmissable event – for anyone lucky enough to be sent an invitation and the accompanying rulebook – is matched only by Green’s determination to make his birthday celebrations so magnificent that famous names will criss-cross the world for a chance to help magnify his social credentials and hence, it has turned out, his business reputation. If his friends’ discretion has allowed some mystery to develop around the precise nature of Green’s appeal, the gossip columns attest to an ever more fabulous, as well as expanding, circle as the tycoon has grown older and, presumably, yet more amusing.

A flavour of his table talk may, in fact, have emerged, in a recorded exchange, during which Green refused to talk to the Guardian’s then financial editor. “He can’t read English,” Green objected. “Mind you, he is a fucking Irishman.”

At Green’s son’s barmitzvah in 2005, £4m bought a three-day party in the Riviera for, it was reported, 300 – paceDunbar – friends and family. Another 200 attended his 50th, which required them, as if to prove that these were all top-notch, genuine friendships, not only to be in Cyprus for the standard three days but to wear togas. For his 55th, loyalty was established by relocation to the Maldives, around 5,000 miles away from London.

By the time of his 60th birthday party, four days in Cancun, at a reported cost of £6.5m, friends included a range of new Hollywood acquisitions, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Hudson and Gwyneth Paltrow, along with trusted intimates – Simon Cowell, Ronnie Wood and Kate Moss – and others of uncertain friendship status: Tess Daly, Mohamed Al Fayed. An admiring Mirror report noted a special Phil touch: “luxury black toilet paper”.

Knowledge of the close bonds inevitably formed amid this sort of generosity must have sustained Green last week as his reputation came under attack, following the destruction of BHS. With friends like the above, and so many of them, it could only be a matter of time before, one by one, they came forward, to pledge that the Phil they love is just not the sort of person who would ever, as alleged, leave former staff struggling in retirement. No way would the provider of luxury black toilet paper in Cancun have paid for it with pensioners’ money, channelled through his Monaco-resident wife, Tina.

Kate Moss famously does not say much in public, other than “basic bitch”, so maybe her reticence is understandable. The silence of Green’s other 300 or so friends: not so much. Come in, Tess? Leonardo? Gwyneth? Hello? Perhaps, given the star count, showbusiness omerta explains the absence of testimonials from friends who must have felt quite sure, when they accepted return flights to the Maldives, that, however repulsively it was spent, Green’s vast fortune was nothing untoward for “an ordinary person with a seriously strong work ethic”. As Green’s wife puts it.

And not only Green’s wife, they might add. It is no time since Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, was as captivated as any supermodel, by Green’s person and talents; more so, actually, since he asked the great party-giver to write an“efficiency review”. “We are extremely fortunate,” Maude oozed, “to have Sir Philip, with his immense commercial experience and of course his fantastic track record at managing large organisations, on board.” Presumably he, like Michael Gove, had concluded that anyone who could appear so often in gossip columns must be possessed of some special genius. “He’s the only person I know who has both Tony Blair and Kate Moss on speed dial,” a worshipful Gove told an audience of schoolchildren, at a kind of Green-centred rally.

Where the pointless excess of Gatsby’s parties engendered suspicion – “Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once” – Green’s seem only to have inspired respect. And the yachts helped. It is easy to argue, now, that absurdly ostentatious boats may be handy indicators of their owners’ values; in Blairite as well as Conservative circles, they have long, regardless of Robert Maxwell and Fayed, been accepted as unparalleled causes for reverence.

For instance, Green’s fellow skipper Leonid Blavatnik, Putin associate and owner of a gin-palace as big as the moon, is a cherished donor, not just to the Tories but to the artistic and academic worlds, his benevolence immortalised in the V&A’s forthcoming Blavatnik Hall and – despite objections – Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

As for Green, the Monaco-based finance expert couldn’t get over public sector waste. “The process is shocking. There’s no reporting. There’s no accountability.” He assured Robert Peston: “You could not be in business if you operated like this.”

In fairness, this was years before Green sold BHS for £1, to a twice-bankrupted entrepreneur with no retail experience, Green’s family having previously extracted £580m in dividends, etc, pre-departure. And the BHS pension fund having somehow acquired a deficit of £571m. Any minute now, one of those people on Green’s speed dial is sure to come along and explain, to the financially illiterate, how utterly irrelevant are these two unrelated numbers.

Until then, Green’s challenge to Dunbar’s Number can remain only that. We can’t be sure, in the light of the past week, that his countless friends will not, like Gatsby’s, attach to new buyers, to the point that someone, maybe the loyal Gove, will mutter “the poor son of a bitch”. Perhaps it’s time, to be on the safe side, for Tina and Phil to throw another party.