“The managing directors will have more time to spend sourcing better products and selling merchandise,” says Hoerner.It is clear that in this process Rose will be only the most visible casualty. Hoerner won’t say how many jobs will go, how much the rejig will cost and how much overhead it will trim.But there could be considerable job losses. Mr Bubb says: “The cost-cutting exercise could yield savings of pounds 20m to pounds 30m a year, considerably higher than the market is expecting.”Asked whether he hopes to be seen as a hero for turning the multiples around, Hoerner says: “This would be the fourth time I’ve turned a business around, and if I do it I won’t complain about being called a hero. I’m betting my reputation on it.”There is a more jaundiced view that in opting to run the non-Debenhams operations Hoerner has pulled out another plum for himself. It might be easier to boost profitability at the fashion chains than at Debenhams where, as Hoerner says, “Terry Green has already done an excellent job”.Hoerner says simply: “I don’t think you can find anybody who reckons running a retail business these days is easy.” Maybe not. But according to one institutional shareholder, their pounds 1bn of sales indicates that the fashion chains’ major problem lies more in the cost of selling than on their ability to shift the merchandise.On this view, Hoerner should be able to generate pounds 100m of profit from the fashion chains in short order That yields about pounds 70m after tax.

But then, what did play any great part in the campaign, except general impressions? It was ever thus and, in April 1997, even thusser.Nevertheless, if Labour came to power on any programme at all, it was one not of social and economic reform such as Attlee’s after 1945 or Lady Thatcher’s after 1979 – largely accidental though the latter may have been – but of constitutional reform: referendums on devolution for Scotland and Wales; another referendum on a changed voting system; elected mayors for London and other cities; a Freedom of Information Act; the abolition of the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords; and the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into our law.It is not, I think, generally realised that the present session of Parliament comes to an end in autumn 1998. Other constitutional changes were announced likewise, and more people took more notice. These proposals did not, it is true, play much part in the election. They were certainly announced in advance, though few people may have been paying much attention at the time. The last Labour leader to rely on extemporisation was Mr Michael Foot, partly because that was the way he was used to doing things, partly because he could not see properly to read the script.Whether the changes to Prime Minister’s Questions are constitutional or merely procedural is a matter of definition and of little importance. Last week he nearly landed himself in what could have been serious trouble over questions of public expenditure, where Mr Gordon Brown had been trying to pull a fast one. I prefer to look on it as an indication of his wish to do things differently, more informally Still, my advice to Mr Blair is to have a care.

No one took much notice at the time, except those of us who have strange and unusual tastes: but that is hardly Mrs Taylor’s fault, or Mr Blair’s either.His insistence on dealing with most questions off the cuff, without recourse to the thick civil service ring-binder file, can I suppose be regarded as a sign of arrogance; of a man who is so confident of his own grasp of many disparate subjects that he does not need the help of others. The changes in Prime Minister’s Questions were well advertised before the election in speeches by him and by Mrs Ann Taylor. Instead they have to rely on those lethal rock-cakes in the Members’ Tearoom. Some of them, indeed, give the impression that they do not altogether welcome the change in their circumstances, which they never expected to happen and has brought about an inconvenient disruption of the even tenor of their happily humdrum lives.Curiously enough, the unexpected size of the Labour majority means that there is very little triumphalism about the place Certainly Mr Blair has shown little enough of it.