By the end of this year, some 30 per cent of the group’s store portfolio will be in the new format, which assuming the consumer doesn’t entirely go on strike, should in itself deliver reasonable growth in like-for-like sales.When you look at where the company has come from since the retail entrepreneur Philip Green made his £4-a-share offer, the progress has been little short of miraculous. From here on in, Mr Rose must rely increasingly on top-line growth to deliver further meaningful improvements in profits.All the same, in my view he’s being too glum. Yet even general merchandise achieved a respectable 0.8 per cent rise in like-for-like sales. This is a much better performance than Next and probably a little bit better than the sector as a whole.More encouraging still is the change in the sales mix, with full price sales of general merchandise up 5.3 per cent and about 35 per cent less stock going into post-Christmas clearance sales than this time last year.Further progress lies as much in the lap of the gods, otherwise known as the nine members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, as with Mr Rose. Rents and utility costs are rising sharply, and he’s not yet confident enough to declare the turnaround in M&S’s fortunes permanent.

After the sharp run up in the share price of recent months, he is perhaps right to want to manage expectations. It is always better to over achieve than to over promise.None the less, methinks he doth protest too much. Most of the sales gain was in foods – up 5.1 per cent in the 13 weeks to 31 December – which has been an easier part of the business to fix than clothing and was heavily promoted over the Christmas period. Sir Terry must look beyond these shores to sustain the heady pace of growth in sales he’s achieved thus far.M&S: reasons to be cheerfulStuart Rose seemed to be attempting to outdo the notoriously gloomy Simon Wolfson, the chief executive of Next, in giving such a downbeat assessment of prospects for Marks & Spencer yesterday.Market conditions remain challenged, he said on announcing a decent 2.9 per cent rise in like-for-like Christmas sales. Tesco may already be close to the high water mark of its UK influence. A backlash is already under way among planning authorities and activists in local communities.

Ambitious plans to double the group’s convenience stores presence over the next 10 years must be open to question.Tesco still has plenty of scope for UK growth in non foods and services, but it is no accident that Sir Terry now devotes so much of his time to overseas ambitions. The New Economics Foundation, a think-tank which has been campaigning against the growing power of the supermarkets, hailed it as a landmark decision which marked a turning of the tide against the mighty Tesco. Not so, says Tesco, which points to a number of similar refusals over the past two years. Tesco makes lots of planning applications, and occasionally they fail.
Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy would be unwise to be so sanguine, and I’m quite sure that beneath the measured, calm exterior, he’s not. A harbinger of things to come for the overarching Tesco, or just part of the usual planning system lottery? Anti-Tesco lobbyists were yesterday reading much significance into Barnet Council’s decision to deny planning permission for a new Tesco Express on the site of an old carpet warehouse in Finchley, London, this on the grounds that it “would have a significantly greater harmful impact on the vitality and viability of nearby town centres than the existing lawful use”. Yesterday’s offer requires customers to take at least some of Sky’s premium-content packages to be eligible. So, to get sports and movies on broadband and mobile, a Sky subscription worth at least £40.50 per month is needed.

To get either movies or sport, £34 a month is required.However, the new services are separate from Sky’s much more ambitious plans for providing a full television service over broadband internet, which it will outline later this year.. The sports service will allow fans to download the highlights of any Premier League football match played that week.”These services are part of a continuing stream of innovations that will create even more reasons to join Sky,” Mr Freudenstein said. We are giving millions of viewers the ability to download movies legally or to keep up with Sky on the move.”From yesterday, 200 films were made available to download, including recent hits such as Spiderman II and classics such as Dr Strangelove In the future, about 1,000 will be featured. And Sky’s news programmes will be available for anyone to download on an iPod or other multimedia players.
Richard Freudenstein, the chief operating officer, said: “Families’ entertainment needs are changing fast and audiences increasingly expect to be able to access content whenever and wherever they want. The big banks there are comfortable with the status quo and have not yet had to face competition from a focused, low-cost provider. Hamza singled out Jews, proclaiming in one of his sermons that “Hitler was sent into the world” because of their “treachery, blasphemy and filth”, the Old Bailey was told.
Hamza, 47, from west London, faces nine charges under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 alleging he solicited others at public meetings to murder Jews and other non-Muslims.