There are lots of plausible explanations for Dame Sharon White’s failure at the department store and grocery chain John Lewis. The retail environment was too tough. Her predecessor expanded too quickly. During a cost–of-living crisis and with the shift to online shopping it was always going to be a very tough gig. Yet once you look a little deeper, the real explanation is this: the quango-cracy, of which she was a leading member, is useless at running a real business.

With her early resignation today, Dame Sharon has, to her credit, recognised a fact that was already painfully obvious to everyone else. Put simply, she was not up to the task of turning around John Lewis, and it would be far better for someone with more experience of rescuing failing retailers to take over. The longer she stayed at the helm, the harder it would be to turn around either John Lewis or Waitrose. It might even have been forced to sacrifice its employee ownership model.

Dame Sharon was not up to the task of turning around John Lewis

On paper, Dame Sharon was impeccably qualified. She was educated at Cambridge, became a high-flyer at the Treasury, and then ran the media regulator Ofcom from 2015 to 2019. She was a leading member of the civil service/think tank/quango class that moves effortlessly from one prominent role to another. She was excellent at ticking all the right boxes on diversity, work-life balance, and inclusiveness. But when it came to the grittier tasks of making sure there was enough milk at your local Waitrose, hammering suppliers on price, and closing down stores that were not performing, she turned out to be hopeless. Nothing in her career had prepared her for making tough decisions, and it was too late to learn in the top job.

There is surely a lesson in that. The quangocracy is very keen on telling businesses how they should run themselves. Companies are constantly told to prioritise staff wellness, carbon neutrality, and supply chain integrity, and all the rest of the faddish ideas that dominate the consultancies and think tanks. Targets are put in place, and fines imposed for not meeting them. But when members of the quango class try and run a real company, they find it is much harder than it looks. Perhaps there’s a lesson to draw from Dame Sharon’s departure: stop lecturing businesses on what they should and shouldn’t do – and leave managing the companies to the people who know how to actually make them work.