With the general election fast approaching, retailers must remember that it would be a disaster for the sector if Labour were victorious.

Over the past 10 years I have shared my retail and life experiences through these columns, hoping to entertain, inspire, raise a smile and generate some life-enhancing value.

As the founder and ‘lead from the front’ boss of DFS for four decades, part-owner and director of Iceland Foods, chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a Tory peer, father of two, grandpa to five and a very happy bloke married for almost 50 years, I hope my opinion is worth a read.

Topics featured included ways to recruit, train and retain staff; a philosophy to keep things simple and maximise profits; the importance of ‘investing’ in marketing; sourcing from China; the efficacy of interest free credit; the value of a wide smile; and the terminal danger of greed.

The columns also mentioned the nice Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and avuncular Sir Philip Green, along with Emmeline Pankhurst, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Jacqueline ‘big is best’ Gold. Living jokes like Heather Mills, John ‘pies’ Prescott, Nigel Farage and Coco the Clown all got a mention alongside bogeymen Vladimir Putin, Colonel Gaddafi, Jimmy Savile and Gary Glitter.

And now 69 days to the general election I give you an urgent, considered and informed view about a fast-looming disaster. The biggest, most frightening threat to our green and pleasant land. The two Ed monster.

While I am not keen on bands (rubber, brass or rock) or wagons (wheels or Volks), I leap eagerly onto the bandwagon of Mr ‘Boots’ Pessina, my noble friend Stuart Rose and those other bold retailers who saw what was staring us all in the face and spoke out.

They recognised the terrifying threat to business, the lifeblood of a healthy economy, from the two Eds and their squabbling comrades. Their experiences roar out that Miliband and Balls are a catastrophe, a grave danger to our future and the improving trading environment we tightened our belts to create.

The feel good factor and consumer confidence essential for retail prosperity and investment can’t exist in the red-tape world of snarling envy and anti-business attitudes at the core of any lefty two Ed government that might fluke into power in a Ukip-complicated, apathetic general election.

The two Eds are interfering, divisive, unashamedly hostile to wealth creators and calling for corporation tax and national insurance hikes. They deliberately create confusion between tax avoidance and evasion and denigrate a minimum wage that has helped generate hundreds of thousands of jobs, threaten to wreck our healthy expanding economy.

It could not be clearer, Conservative competence versus instability and chaos. Do not let it happen.

Forget manifesto promises, spin, leaders’ debates, sound bites, eating bacon sandwiches and memory loss. Just picture this nightmare – imagine the two Eds gloating and smirking as they swagger up Downing Street on the morning of May 8 if the worst happened. Your future, that of your family and all those near and dear would be in their grasping old Labour, trade union economic suicide grip.

I rest my case on behalf of “the economy is everything so do not give the car keys back to those who crashed it before, party”.

  • Lord Kirkham is the founder of DFS