Catching up on the two big exits last week.

Big news today is Dixons’ profit warning, which only goes to show just how hard it is out there right now. Not sure John Browett is doing too much wrong, but it’s very difficult if a) your product categories are largely discretionary purchases and b) your sector is in the face of stiff competition from the web and the supermarkets. Both those statements apply to Dixons (and Comet and Best Buy too) so it’s in for a hard year.

I was off last week so missed the two big chief executive departures. The first was Carl McPhail, who left New Look along with chairman John Gildersleeve in the wake of dismal trading. Everyone has known New Look has been performing very poorly for a while, and I got a sense of the pressure Carl was under late last year when he went absolutely bananas when he appeared in one of our cartoons.

I’m sure that was just a reflection of the enormous pressure which followed the failure of the company’s IPO attempt. Working for private equity is lucrative but those guys don’t tolerate failure and Carl must have felt seriously under the cosh. The atmosphere at New Look hasn’t been great for a while from what we hear.

The question now is whether the return of Tom Singh can turn things round - the move from Weymouth to London was clearly very disruptive from a buying point of view and the fashion market is brutal at the moment. Whatever happens, the IPO is now a very long way off in the distance.

Andy Hornby is a very different character from Carl but his exit from Boots, which we exclusively revealed on Friday, was also no surprise, although the timing was odd considering it was only a week after he’d been telling the Boots story at the Retail Week Conference. He was a great name for Boots to secure and had a formidable reputation from his time at Asda, but no-one ever quite understood what his role was at the high street chemist.

Retail remained in the very safe hands of Boots lifer Alex Gourlay, whose talents have really come to the fore since Stefano Pessina bought ther business, while Pessina’s other half Ornella Barra has an iron grip over the wholesale business. The word on the street is that Hornby perhaps was still weighed down with the baggage of his time as chief executive of HBoS during the banking crisis, which must have been a harrowing experience. Maybe a bit of time out will do him good, while I’m sure Boots will sail on regardless.