Richard Branson is the invisible man but Virgin's big deals show he's still sprinkling stardust

My Week

It’s been a busy week for the Virgin empire. On Tuesday, the long-time Virgin Money backer Wilbur Ross led a £240m share sale, reducing his stake to 23 per cent. On Thursday, the private equity group CVC left the gym chain Virgin Active as the South African retail tycoon Christo Wiese bought in, valuing the business at £870m.

The connection between the two transactions is, of course, Sir Richard Branson, but it is noticeable how incidental he is these days. Britain’s most famous businessman is a past master at letting others stump up the cash while he takes a back seat and lets his carefully protected brand do the talking. In the case of Virgin Active, his group will bank £230m from Mr Wiese but hang on to a 20 per cent stake.

Virgin is not particularly a youth brand anymore, but appeals to the growing middle classes in South Africa, where most of its gym members are.

Sir Richard’s other big achievement has been to win back the stock market. He shunned it for years after the difficult float of Virgin Group in 1986. The shares crashed because growth failed to match expectations and he retreated, hurt, matching the offer price to go private again in 1988.

In more recent years, Virgin Mobile, later rolled into Virgin Media, was a roaring success for investors. It has proved to be the same at Virgin Money, where the Virgin Group still owns 35 per cent: the stock is up 40 per cent since its delayed float last November. The City has lapped up the idea of it leading a new wave of retail banking challengers.

Again, Sir Richard appears to be barely there. His name does not even appear in Virgin Money’s annual report, nor is he a director. No matter. The fairy dust he sprinkles still has huge value.

Openreach does have a rival but it’s keeping its head down

The knives are out for BT. Its telecoms rivals will not rest until concessions are found from the takeover of the mobile operator EE. Sir Charles Dunstone, chairman of the broadband provider TalkTalk, calculated this week that the enlarged group will soak up 40 per cent of all money spent on telecoms by UK businesses and consumers.

The hope is that the new boss of the regulator Ofcom, Sharon White, will prise ownership of the fixed national network Openreach from BT as part of the first review of the communications market for a decade. She has made encouraging noises, talking about promoting competition and even deregulation – although few regulators find that they end their jobs with less to do than they had at the beginning.

Most broadband operators must use BT’s network to reach their customers locally – a deal struck in the last review to boost the take-up of internet access. They think that system could be cheaper and more efficient if Openreach were under separate ownership.

An alternative keeps getting overlooked. Aside from BT’s network, Virgin Media has a very good one of its own. But while BT is ordered to share the use of its wires, the Virgin network is closed to rivals. If BT is such an unreliable provider, what better way to bring fresh competition to the market than opening up the closest thing Britain has to a second national network?

Virgin’s cables reach half of the country today, but the company is investing so it will pass nearly 17 million premises by 2020. This topic is one where Sir Richard’s challenger brand does not like to be challenged. It is time that it was.

If vinyl can come back, why not independent shops?

Today’s Record Store Day chimes with the vinyl revival but also the growing focus on what it takes for independent shops to co-exist alongside the big chains.

It was a topic of conversation over lunch in London’s Chinatown on Monday with Brian Bickell, whose Shaftesbury group owns Carnaby Street and chunks of Soho, where Berwick Street will host a “mile of vinyl”, DJs and bands.

Mr Bickell has tried to encourage small traders in his 29 years at the property investment company. Bar the odd spat with longstanding tenants, he has done so. Having taken a decade to piece together the Carnaby Street shops into one portfolio, he’s not exactly fly-by-night.

But retail is changing fast. Web shopping is a convenient alternative to traipsing the streets, and Westfield and other shopping malls have upped the ante. Nearby Regent Street has gone upmarket, with luxury goods sellers moving in where tartan shops and souvenirs were once peddled.

Shaftesbury’s answer has been to mix shopping in its £2.6bn estate with food and drink. The company also rents out 500 flats over its shops. Some tenants eat out so much, they return the keys at the end of the lease with the instructions still in the oven.

The next challenge is the expected rise in business rates in 2017 that some fear might stop the good times rolling in the West End. The hike is manageable for nationwide retailers, which can balance the extra fees they will pay in London with savings in parts of the country where high streets are struggling. But the quirky sole traders don’t get the same trade-off.

Mr Bickell favours investing in better streets, more pedestrianisation and, hopefully, greater footfall. Already 50 million visitors pass through Chinatown every year. A few more won’t make any difference will they?