In 1984 Mohamed Alshaya, the young scion of a wealthy Kuwaiti dynasty, educated at Wharton business school and working at Morgan Stanley in New York, received a telephone call from his father.

“You had better come back to the family,” said the elder Mr Alshaya, with a summons Mohamed had always known would come. Business school and the bank had been mere staging posts before a return to the family company. But before the journey home there was one last educational stop for the suave son – a stint on the shop floor in a Mothercare store in Manchester.