If it was a case of winning points for trying, then by now Marks & Spencer would be sitting pretty at the top of the premier league.
The retailer has been through numerous reinventions, each of them designed to modernise the group, make it relevant to the contemporary shopper or turnaround a problematic underperformance.
Thus far, each of them has failed, raising the question of whether the difficulties faced by the former blue-chip stalwart are not just structural but terminal. M&S was the first British retailer to post annual pre-tax profits of more than £1 billion in 1998 but this year it suffered the ignominy of falling out of the FTSE 100 for the first time since the index began in the Eighties.
Could it