Mike Ashley: I'm not Father Christmas – but I am David Brent

Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley, who fines his staff 15 minutes wages for being one minute late, took four months to turn up to his parliamentary grilling, but it was worth the wait

Mike Ashley, founder of sports clothing retailer Sports Direct, gives evidence to the business, skills and innovation parliamentary select committee

If you’ve ever been locked out of your place of work and then fined for turning up late; if you’ve then been publicly victimised over the PA system in front of 2,000 colleagues; if you’ve then been asked for sex in return for a full-time contract; and if after all that you’ve been so scared of taking time off that you’ve gone into labour in the staff toilet; well you still wouldn’t have had a worse day at the office than Mike Ashley, major shareholder and whipcracker-in-chief of high street megalith Sports Direct.

In 2007, retail rotunda-morph Ashley made £929m in a single day when he floated his bargain basement sports empire where staff are fined 15 minutes' wages if they arrive a minute late. So once Ashley had settled the bill for the more than four months it has taken him to turn up in front of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee – according to Sports Direct’s own unpunctuality punishment tariff, £1.25trn – at least a quarter of his own personal fortune had been wiped out, so you can hardly blame him for his rather curmudgeonly start.

I see you’re wearing a Newcastle United tie? “Yes.”

How is your review into working practices at your company? “Ongoing.”

When will it be finished? “Never.”

Still, if any of Ashley’s 20,000 staff were cashing in all their bi-monthly toilet breaks at once to tune in to proceedings they will have found his defiant monosyllabism reassuring. Among the grievances raised by the handful of them that were brave enough to alert a trade union to their mistreatment was the common practice of personalised public bollockings over the public address system at the company’s Derbyshire distribution warehouse when items take too long to find.

Now they know, next time a 100 decibel voice from the heavens wants to know why they still haven’t found the Extra Effing Large Tottenham Effing Away Strip, they should just shout back that work is “ongoing” and will be finished sometime around “never”.

Ashley brought his PR man along with him, the rather more polished Keith Bishop of Keith Bishop Associates, who only occasionally tried to interrupt, noticeably when his client was asked if he considered himself to be a “kind person”.

“I wouldn’t say I was Father Christmas,” said Ashley, for a second time, as if there were anyone out there needing to be disabused of the notion. That said, a few dozen elves with a year to make toys for every kid on the planet probably have an easy time of it by comparison.

He did at least make clear that Sports Direct is a disgusting place to work. “If one of my kids went to work at somewhere and they were two minutes late and they got fined 15 minutes I wouldn’t think it was fair. I’d think that’s unreasonable,” he said, before assuring us that this policy that has directly enriched him wasn’t his idea.

As for the female member of staff who had told union officials that two of her male managers had told her if she wanted a permanent contract they could “discuss it over dinner”, such practices were “disgusting”.

Ashley turned to his PR man again: “Sexual...what did you call it, you know in the office?”

“Harassment,” Bishop kindly obliged, in the year 2016.

“Sexual harassment. It’s disgusting,” he said, before promising to do his bit to stamp it out. “Simple as that fellas,” he said, then glanced toward

the female members of the committee. “Not just fellas, girls, sorry.”

It was pure David Brent, from start to finish, with one notable exception. David Brent is a work of fiction and a failure. Mike Ashley, though a pastiche of a Dickensian factory owner, appears to be real, has a personal fortune of £2.5bn. Still, at least he’s not Father Christmas.