For Philip Green, it is clearly a bigger moment than we can ever comprehend. Taking to the stage at Arcadia’s London base on Thursday morning, with Ain’t No Mountain High Enough pounding from the speakers, he tells his top managers what they have come to hear. They have created retail history. Profits at the retail group are soaring, the £808m borrowed to buy the business two years ago has already been cleared, and a massive dividend is being paid out.

At the front, Green’s wife Tina is in tears as she stands next to his friend and backer Peter Cummings, head of corporate banking at Bank of Scotland. Even by the Green family’s own standards, it has been an extraordinary fortnight. Only months after walking away from a second unsuccessful bid for Marks & Spencer, Green has bounced back with strong sets of figures for both Arcadia, the store group that runs Top Shop, Wallis and Miss Selfridge, and BHS, the clothing chain he bought four years ago.

More than that, at the age of 52 he has cemented his position in the pantheon of retail greats, not just by paying off the large sums he borrowed so quickly, but by making explicit what he could have been sharing with M&S shareholders.

Two weeks ago he took a final £40m dividend from BHS, to add to the £147.5m he had taken earlier in the year. On Thursday he drew £460m from Arcadia — possibly the biggest dividend ever paid to an individual in British business history.

That makes nearly £650m taken in a year from two companies in which he originally staked only £89m of his own money. The extra cash he borrowed to buy the firms has been paid back. And the firms — which he owns — are profitable, making more than £400m a year on combined sales of almost £2.5 billion. Right now, he is on top of the world.

A few days earlier, bouncing around behind the glass-topped table that doubles as his desk at BHS, tie off, shirt open, Green seems to be almost gurgling with pleasure as he runs me through the superlatives.

“We are making the best returns of any private retailer in Europe,” he says, lighting up another long, thin cigarette, “and we are probably the best-performing private retail group in the world today.”

He takes another quick puff. Green in a good mood is compelling company. Skittle-shaped and with brown eyes twinkling, he gabbers away almost flirtatiously, a testament to the extraordinary energy that he invests in everything. He never stops.

This past fortnight has been important to Green for another reason. He is bound by Takeover Panel rules gagging him from discussing a third prospective bid for M&S, but he knows that, if he does bid again, he has to win over the legions of small shareholders who rejected him last time. Back then, he was too easily besmirched as loutish, vulgar and on the make. Next time he wants to play a cleverer game.

“That’s why I’ve selected you,” he says, undercutting his cunning in his characteristically upfront way.

He wants to explain himself, and he wants what has happened at BHS and Arcadia to be understood. Holding forth in his ornately elegant second-floor office overlooking London’s Marylebone Road, fiddling restlessly with the tools of his trade — the weekly profit-and-loss summaries, the bid documents, the photos of refits, the ever-present clutch of mobile phones — he is, you sense, always on the alert, constantly filing away information. Hence the paperwork he devours between calls.

No computer? “Don’t need one, it’s all up here,” he says, tapping the broadening forehead beneath his swept back grey hair.

Others will tell you that he has distilled 30 years of retail experience into an instinctive ability to know what succeeds, and what doesn’t, on Britain’s high streets. And now he is at the top of his game, and playing for very high stakes indeed, because that is his nature.

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