Thanks to Ocado, Marks and Spencer has put in a decent performance in this most terrible of times

I don’t know about your local M&S, but the two near us have been doing a fine trade. Thanks to selling food, they’re both allowed to keep selling fashion and homewares on their ground floors, too.

In High Street Ken, they’ve even helpfully moved a bit of menswear down there to capture passing food shoppers.

Useful for stocking up on emergency WFH-wear, but no doubt galling for Gap, Uniqlo and other neighbours forced to close.

Not that it helped M&S much in the greater scheme of things. Clothing and homewares still plunged more than 40% in stores during the last lockdown.

But that was entirely to be expected. For all the grim headlines from Covid closures, there were good signs in these numbers; most notably, the growing success of online and click-and-collect.  The Ocado tie-up — expensive at the time — has paid off handsomely.

M&S’s belated leap into the digital age has not only offset some of the pain of lockdowns, but will set the business up for a brighter long term future post-pandemic.

Also encouraging was its discipline on stock levels in fashion.  

Its buyers seem to have gauged shoppers’ demands far better than in recent times despite the Covid disruption. That meant far less need to discount unsold stuff, which is never easy online; just ask Next.

M&S will have to keep improving its fashions when normal trends resume and folks want more than pyjamas and trackie bottoms, of course.  

That’s why its move on Jaeger makes sense. M&S should have made itself a destination for smart, middle-aged, middle class brands long ago rather than hanging on to the M&S-only legacy of St Michael.

It’s always unwise to predict M&S has turned a corner, but this was a decent showing in a nightmare marketplace.