Red Ed blasts the titans of commerce

The head of Boots, Stefano Pessina, struck a nerve when he called Labour's policies "anti-business". Emily Hohler reports.

Labour leader Ed Miliband's "difference of opinion with various titans of commerce and their brethren in the Conservative press" is a golden opportunity, says Matthew Norman in The Independent. The row kicked off when Stefano Pessina, the owner of Boots, warned that Labour's "anti-business" policies would be a disaster for Britain. It escalated when Labour retaliated with references to Boots' tax affairs.

Pessina has since been joined by Luke Johnson, the Pizza Express boss; Lord Rose, the former boss of M&S, fretting about the "punitive taxes on business people"; and Sir Ian Cheshire, once of B&Q, who accused Labour of trying to "stifle the debate" by attacking Pessina.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.