Stuart Rose: from hero to zero

When Sir Stuart Rose and his fellow directors walked onto the stage at the Marks & Spencer annual shareholders meeting two years ago, they were greeted with spontaneous and rapturous applause. The share price had passed £6 on its way to £7 and the new range of £5 T-shirts were selling faster than punnets of strawberries in the food halls.

Rose had revived the group's fortunes and put the nation's trust back in the brand. Analysts were once more forecasting profits of £1bn a year ­ - not seen since 1998.
 
Yet despite M&S hitting that target, on Wednesday at the Royal Festival Hall Rose will face the most hostile audience of shareholders in his four-year tenure. A quarter of them have pledged to vote against him becoming executive chairman and the rest simply want to know what has gone wrong.

Since the shock announcement last week that M&S comparable food sales had fallen by five per cent in the last three months, and the abrupt departure of former Waitrose boss Steve Esom as head of food after a year in the job, the share price has cratered by more than 30 per cent to 212p, just over half what Sir Philip Green, the Topshop magnate, offered for the company in the summer of 2004. Profit forecasts for this year have been slashed to £700m and there are whispers of a dividend cut.
 
Rose, who began his career at M&S and made his name turning round Debenhams and Arcadia, is the third boss of Marks & Spencer to make the journey from hero to zero in the past decade. After achieving the magical £1bn two years running, Sir Richard Greenbury was forced to step aside after profits halved in 1999. His Belgian successor, the olive-oil-pressing Luc Vandevelde, had some success, but when Green made his bid attempt in 2004 Vandevelde was out while Rose and his team arrived like a crack parachute regiment to ward off the invader.
 
What characterises these events is not just their overtones of Greek tragedy but the intense public interest in Marks & Spencer's fortunes. As a nation we simply love Marks & Spencer, regard it as part of our heritage, despair and rage when things go ill and rejoice when they go well.

One reason may be that the shares are more widely held than in almost any other British company; there are nearly 213,000 shareholders and most of those are customers as well. Just as important is that for most people over 30 - ­ and many under - ­ Marks & Spencer is where you went with your mum. Without realising it, you inhaled those tenets of quality, value and service until you believed them.

Until 15 years ago, when Next first became a force in the land, the only competition to M&S came from posh department stores where cardigans cost three times as much for the same quality.

Globalisation, Primark and the celebrity culture have lured the young away, but despite the roller-coaster ride of the past decade Marks & Spencer continues to hold a special place in the nation's heart. It is because of this that while Rose may be the first in a long line of corporate captains to face disgruntled shareholders in the coming months, no other will be subject to such battalions of outrage. ·