A baby doll sits on the desk in Andy Street’s sparsely furnished new digs in Edgbaston, 10 minutes’ drive south of Birmingham city centre. The former John Lewis managing director, a compact, impish stick of energy, has been bustling around the office, introducing his team, reeling off diary commitments (“Cyclists for Birmingham, the apprenticeship organisation for Wolverhampton”) and requesting cups of tea — pronounced “coops of tay” in his Midlands accent, which seems to have thickened miraculously since he moved up from London.
The doll, Street explains, was a gift from colleagues on the John Lewis board when he left in October after more than three decades with the partnership’s department-store business. “And do you know what it’s for?” he asks. Does it represent the