Sir Stuart Rose is described as "one of the country's most inspirational leaders" by Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary. So he has appointed the former head of M&S – in charge when the value of shares dropped by 30%, former head of Argos and current chair of Ocado – to overhaul the leadership of underperforming hospitals and ensure managers are "more visible and in touch with frontline patients, services and staff". Leave aside the management-speak question of where else patients might be other than on the "frontline" – under the bed? Hiding behind the junk snack dispenser? – what could Rose possibly import from M&S to Britain's best-loved, albeit permanently reorganised, semi-privatised, constantly criticised and battered institution?
You might perhaps begin with the feeling that many of us encounter when we are again overtaken by that irrational and profoundly optimistic belief that perhaps M&S has got better.
So we give it one more chance and step back into its always over-warm embrace only to discover that the heart instantly grows heavy, the eyesight is blurred by visions of hundreds of identical pastel jumpers and life flashes before you as you wade through Per Una's latest effort to dress the modern woman as a colour-blind nonagenarian. And no, the blouse in the full-page magazine advert looks nothing like the real thing.
Depression hovers or at least a profound sense of futility. This is invariably compounded by what is an increasingly desperate effort to find a "customer adviser" who is not engaged in an intensely personal conversation with another customer adviser and who therefore does not wish to be bothered with an inquiry about the whereabouts of the black V-neck jumpers after yet another radical re-organisation of the shop floor? (Answer, at the rear of the store, where all M&S's diminishing number of "bestsellers" are invariably kept in a vast customer adviser-free zone.)
The NHS, like M&S, is far from perfect. Scandals occur, people rightly complain, the Francis report last year identified a problem with leadership and criticised the "culture of fear". Nevertheless walking into many hospitals as I, like others, have done with elderly and anxious relatives, the volunteers are friendly, the staff warm and supportive. It is a very different transaction to that at the heart of so many retail operations, however once revered as in the case of M&S. So, what can Rose offer?
He could play to his past strengths. Crab gratin and easily carved duck might not go amiss on the hospital menu if the management team in charge of NHS catering can be coaxed to relinquish the grey knotted mince and scary primrose scrambled eggs of which it is so extremely fond (to the frustration of many a celebrity chef hired and de-hired as the healthy food tsar). But more than that? Production lines and supply chains, standardisation to achieve efficiencies of scale, belong on the shop floor, not in the NHS, where we know the fragile meaning of care is so vulnerable to the tyranny of targets, processes, management overload and inflexibility.
Arguably, M&S's long-term malaise in clothing is easily diagnosed. It no longer knows whom it is serving, how and why. It has lost its vocation. Luckily, in spite of all its travails, the NHS is different.