Mark and Pete

Victoria Beckham Holdings has finally made a profit. After 18 years of fashion shows, beauty launches, celebrity cachet, private investment, substantial losses and, one assumes, quite a lot of very expensive beige, Victoria Beckham’s fashion and beauty business has posted its first operating profit.

And not a tiny one either.

For 2025, Victoria Beckham Holdings reported revenue of £129.8 million, up 15 per cent from £112.7 million the year before. Operating profit came in at £7.3 million, compared with a £1.6 million operating loss in 2024. EBITDA rose more than fivefold to £12.1 million. It was also the company’s fifth consecutive year of double-digit revenue growth.

So, has Posh finally done it?

Well, yes. But there is quite a lot of history sitting behind that £7.3 million.

Victoria Beckham launched the label in 2008, debuting her ready-to-wear collection at New York Fashion Week. The beauty arm followed in 2019. For years, though, the business lost money. By 2022 it was reportedly nearly £54 million in debt, while accumulated losses over the longer period have gone beyond £66 million.

Which raises the slightly impolite question Mark and Pete are asking in this episode: was this always a genuinely good business waiting to come right, or a terrible business kept alive because Victoria Beckham happened to be married to a very rich former footballer and had access to investors most struggling fashion designers can only dream about?

The answer, annoyingly, may be both.

Because the turnaround now looks real. Beauty has become enormously important and reportedly makes up around two-thirds of group revenue. Products such as the Satin Kajal eyeliner have become strong sellers, while fashion has performed well in tailoring, occasion wear, denim and jersey. Better cost control, stronger direct-to-consumer sales and international expansion have all helped.

And that changes the story.

Keeping a loss-making company alive for years using outside money looks foolish right up until the moment it begins generating sustainable profits. Then somebody will inevitably write a business-school case study explaining that it was visionary patience all along.

Mark and Pete look at the numbers behind Victoria Beckham’s first profit, the historic losses, the role of David Beckham and outside investors, the rise of Victoria Beckham Beauty and the uncomfortable but interesting question of whether celebrity businesses get chances ordinary entrepreneurs never would.

Is this finally a great British business success story?

Or merely the first year in which an extremely expensive hobby has remembered it is supposed to make money?

Either way, after 18 years, Posh is in the black.

You have to admire the persistence. Even if the accountant needed rather more convincing.

Keir Starmer resigns as MP, bringing an extraordinary political career to a rather abrupt close. After becoming Labour leader in 2020, winning a huge Commons majority in the 2024 UK general election, becoming Prime Minister and then leaving Downing Street in July 2026, Sir Keir has now decided to leave Parliament as well. So the question rather writes itself: was Keir Starmer Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister?

That is the deliberately provocative question Mark and Pete tackle in this episode. Starmer was spectacularly successful at getting Labour into power. He took a party flattened in 2019 and, five years later, put it back in government with 411 MPs. You cannot really call that political incompetence. Yet that 411-seat victory came on only about 34 per cent of the national vote, an enormous parliamentary majority resting on a rather less enormous popular mandate.

What happened afterwards, though, is rather more awkward. A premiership of barely two years, collapsing public enthusiasm, internal Labour rebellions, difficult economic choices and, eventually, Andy Burnham taking over as Prime Minister.

And then there were the U-turns. Oh, the U-turns.

Winter fuel payments. Welfare reform. The grooming gangs inquiry. Digital ID. Earlier promises on tuition fees and green investment. Positions announced firmly, defended firmly and, sometimes with impressive speed, replaced by another firm position. Starmer’s critics came to argue that the problem was not simply that he changed his mind. Governments have to do that occasionally. It was that voters increasingly struggled to work out what the underlying Starmer position actually was.

Now comes perhaps the neatest turn of all. After indicating that he intended to remain in Parliament until the next general election, Starmer has resigned as MP for Holborn and St Pancras. The seat he first won in 2015 will now face a by-election, with Green leader Zack Polanski already saying he intends to stand.

So what exactly is the Starmer legacy? A highly effective Leader of the Opposition who turned out to be a poor Prime Minister? A decent man trapped by events and impossible expectations? Or the political embodiment of managerial Britain, endlessly reviewing, consulting, recalibrating and then discovering that somebody else has acquired the keys to Number 10?

Mark and Pete react to Starmer’s resignation, revisit some of his most memorable political reversals, assess Labour under Andy Burnham, and ask where Sir Keir sits among Britain’s shortest and least successful premierships.

Was he really Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister?

Liz Truss may reasonably request the right of reply.

Politics, power, promises and the peculiar speed with which yesterday’s landslide can become today’s footnote. Psalm 146 offers an older warning: “Put not your trust in princes.” Westminster continues to provide the illustrations.

Britain’s favourite flowers, the occasions we buy them for, and one extraordinary donation of 17,000 white roses are at the heart of this episode of Mark and Pete. We look at why roses still dominate the British flower market, why flowers matter so much emotionally, and what happens when thousands of perfectly good blooms are rescued from the bin and turned into something useful.

Because flowers are odd things, really.

We cut them off a living plant, wrap them in paper, hand them to someone we love, and somehow this is understood as tenderness rather than horticultural violence.

And yet it works.

Roses remain Britain’s favourite flower, with tulips, daffodils and sunflowers also near the top of the list. We send flowers for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, new babies, illness, apologies, thank-yous and, occasionally, simply because someone thought of us. Which means flowers accompany us through almost the whole human story.

Birth, love, celebration, sickness, regret and death.

Not bad going for something that spends most of its life in a vase.

This episode begins with a remarkable story from East Yorkshire, where the Flower Box project in Beverley received a donation of around 17,000 white roses from a wedding company. Rather than allowing them to go to waste, volunteers sorted and sold them cheaply, raising money for charitable causes and giving thousands of flowers a second life.

That opens up another question too.

How many flowers are flown thousands of miles, used for one event, then simply thrown away?

The Flower Box rescues blooms from weddings, supermarkets and funerals and repurposes them into bouquets, dried arrangements and confetti, while supporting local charities and community projects. It is practical, slightly eccentric, and rather British.

We also look at why flowers affect us so strongly. Surveys suggest a large majority of people say flowers improve their mood, while receiving them can make people feel appreciated, loved and remembered. And there is an amusing imbalance here too: women are far more likely to receive flowers than men, while many men say they never receive them at all.

So should men be sent flowers more often?

Would Mark want a bunch of roses?

Would Pete?

And why do flowers carry so much symbolic meaning in the first place?

In this episode, we explore Britain’s favourite blooms, the strange language of flowers, the occasions that still matter, and why something so simple can say what people often struggle to put into words.

Sometimes you really can just say it with flowers.

Why do advertisers use cute animals to sell us everything from toilet roll and insurance to paint, tea and batteries? In this episode of Mark and Pete, we celebrate Britain’s most memorable advertising animals, from the Andrex puppy and Compare the Market meerkats to the Dulux dog, Churchill the bulldog and those slightly unnerving PG Tips chimps.

Because there is a principle here. A very successful one.

Brands discovered long ago that if the product itself is dull, technical, embarrassing or simply not terribly lovable, attaching a cute animal to it can work wonders. Toilet paper is toilet paper. Insurance comparison websites are not exactly objects of affection. Paint is useful, but few people have ever gazed misty-eyed at a tin of emulsion.

Then along comes a Labrador puppy.

Suddenly the product feels warm, soft, friendly and familiar.

The Andrex puppy first appeared in 1972 and became one of the longest-running advertising mascots in Britain. The Compare the Market meerkats arrived in 2009, built around the magnificently silly joke of confusing “market” with “meerkat”, and rapidly became more famous than many actual television personalities. Aleksandr and Sergei gave a comparison website something it badly needed: a personality.

Then there is the Dulux dog. The Old English Sheepdog first appeared in advertising in the 1960s after one reportedly wandered into filming and looked so good that the company simply kept him. Sensible decision. There have since been generations of Dulux dogs, all selling the reassuring idea of home, comfort and slightly expensive paint.

But why do these animals work so well?

Partly it is what psychologists call “baby schema”. Big eyes, rounded faces, soft features and slightly helpless expressions trigger protective and affectionate responses in us. We anthropomorphise animals too, giving them voices, motives, personalities and little imaginary lives. Once that happens, the mascot stops being decoration and becomes someone we recognise.

And recognition matters enormously in advertising.

A recurring character can make a brand instantly identifiable before we have even properly registered the product. That is why mascots often survive for decades while advertising executives, slogans and entire marketing departments come and go.

In this episode, Mark and Pete ask why cute animals are such powerful selling tools, remember the advertising mascots Britain grew up with, look at the psychology behind them and wonder whether modern advertising became less memorable when it stopped giving us puppies, meerkats, bulldogs and sheepdogs.

Perhaps brands did not need more influencers.

Perhaps they just needed a dog.

Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80, and in this episode of Mark and Pete we pay tribute to one of the most remarkable, successful and strangely universally loved entertainers of the modern age. Singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, philanthropist and owner of rather more rhinestones than most regional theatres could manage between them, Dolly Parton became something far bigger than a country music star.

Born into poverty in rural Tennessee as one of 12 children, Dolly went from singing in church and appearing on local radio to becoming one of the biggest names in American music. She wrote thousands of songs, sold more than 100 million records worldwide and gave us classics including Jolene, 9 to 5, Coat of Many Colors and, of course, I Will Always Love You.

And that last song alone has quite a story.

Dolly wrote I Will Always Love You as a farewell to Porter Wagoner when she left his television show to pursue her own career. Elvis Presley later wanted to record it, but his manager demanded half the publishing rights. Dolly said no. Politely, naturally, but no nonetheless. Years later Whitney Houston recorded it and turned it into one of the biggest-selling singles of all time. Sometimes keeping hold of your copyright is quite a good idea.

But Dolly Parton’s legacy is about far more than music.

Her Imagination Library has distributed hundreds of millions of free books to children around the world. She donated substantial sums to hospitals, disaster relief and medical research, including funding that contributed to work behind the Moderna Covid vaccine. Dollywood became one of Tennessee’s biggest tourist attractions and major employers. She seems to have understood something many wealthy celebrities rather miss: having an enormous amount of money gives you the opportunity to do an enormous amount of good.

So why did almost everybody like Dolly?

That is perhaps the more interesting question.

She was flamboyant without seeming vain, famous without appearing remote, deeply Christian without pretending to be perfect, and enormously successful while retaining the ability to make herself the butt of the joke. She once observed that it cost a lot of money to look this cheap. There are entire celebrity careers that could have been improved by that level of self-awareness.

In this episode, Mark and Pete look back at Dolly Parton’s extraordinary life, her Christian faith, her songwriting, her business instincts, her generosity, Dollywood, the Imagination Library and the extraordinary cultural reach of a woman who began life in a one-room cabin in Tennessee.

A genuine American original.

And yes, inevitably, we will always love her.

Britain’s obesity crisis is getting worse, and the latest figures suggest younger adults are gaining weight faster than ever. According to the King’s Fund, obesity rates in England are now at record levels, with around 30% of adults living with obesity or severe obesity, roughly double the proportion seen in the early 1990s. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, the rise is even more striking. Around 18% are now obese or severely obese, compared with just 6% in 1993.

Hence the title of this episode of Mark and Pete: Gross Britannia: Britain Is Getting Fatter.

Cheerful stuff.

But beneath the slightly rude title sits a serious question. What on earth has happened to us?

This is not simply a matter of people becoming greedier, lazier, or somehow morally defective because they have discovered crisps. The environment around food has changed enormously. Ultra-processed food is cheap, convenient, heavily marketed and everywhere. Portion sizes have grown. Delivery apps can now bring a week's worth of calories to the front door before you've found your slippers. Many jobs involve sitting down all day, entertainment involves sitting down all evening, and even shopping can be done while remaining impressively horizontal.

And then there is poverty, stress, sleep, mental health, childhood habits, lack of exercise, local environment and, increasingly, medication.

The arrival of Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro has changed the obesity debate dramatically. These drugs can help some people lose significant amounts of weight and may prove enormously important medically. But do we really want the national plan to be: create an obesogenic culture, then inject everybody afterwards?

That seems, well, slightly backwards.

The King’s Fund says England has had 14 government obesity strategies since 1992, while obesity has continued to rise. There are now thought to be around 14 million adults in England living with obesity or severe obesity, with vast consequences for diabetes, heart disease, joint problems, NHS demand and public spending.

So what should actually change?

Do we regulate junk-food advertising more aggressively? Improve school meals? Make healthy food cheaper? Encourage walking and cycling? Teach cooking properly again? Restrict portion sizes? Tax sugar harder? Or is government already interfering quite enough in what people put on their plates?

There is also the awkward personal question of self-control. Christianity treats the body as something significant, not disposable. Food is good. Feasting is good. Enjoyment is good. But being dominated by appetite is something else.

So this episode asks what Britain should do about obesity without shaming people, pretending weight is simple, or handing responsibility entirely to either government or the individual.

Because clearly what we are doing now is not working.

zE-scooter accidents in Britain are rising sharply, with hundreds of riders and pedestrians suffering serious injuries and hospitals seeing a worrying increase in children hurt while using electric scooters. They are fast, cheap, convenient and now thoroughly woven into city life. They are also, increasingly, a menace on Britain’s streets.

In this episode of Mark and Pete, we look at the growing problem of e-scooter injuries, road safety and regulation in the UK, and ask whether it is time riders had to prove they can actually use one before being unleashed upon the rest of us.

Recent figures from three major children’s trauma centres in England make grim reading. Between 2019 and 2024, 477 children were treated for e-scooter injuries, with cases rising from fewer than ten in 2019 to nearly 150 in 2024. The average age was just 12. Around a quarter suffered head injuries, almost one in five suffered facial injuries, and fewer than 2 per cent were recorded as wearing helmets.

Nationally, the picture is scarcely more reassuring. In 2025 there were 1,377 reported e-scooter collisions in Great Britain, resulting in 1,477 casualties, including 484 people seriously injured and ten deaths. And because many incidents never reach the police statistics, the real total is almost certainly higher.

The oddest part of all this is that privately owned e-scooters are still generally illegal to ride on public roads and pavements, while rental schemes operate under special rules. Britain has therefore managed to create the perfect regulatory muddle: thousands of machines being sold, thousands being ridden, and a legal framework that seems to hover somewhere between prohibition and a shrug.

So what should happen?

We ask whether e-scooter riders should have to earn some form of competency badge or basic licence, perhaps rather like the old cycling proficiency test. Nothing elaborate. A little Highway Code knowledge, some practical riding, braking, signalling and basic road awareness. In other words, evidence that the person travelling silently towards you at 15 mph has at least met a traffic cone before.

Would compulsory helmets help? Should scooters carry visible registration? Should there be age limits, insurance or proper enforcement?

E-scooters are probably not going away. The real question is whether Britain can make them useful without turning every pavement into a low-speed obstacle course.

Ferrari’s first electric car has arrived, and the Ferrari Luce is causing exactly the sort of argument you would expect when the most famous maker of roaring petrol-engined supercars decides to plug one into the mains. The new fully electric Ferrari Luce has more than 1,000 horsepower, four electric motors, a top speed of around 192 mph and a claimed range of 329 miles. It will cost about £440,000 in the UK. Which is quite a lot to spend to avoid buying petrol.

But even that figure was comprehensively upstaged when the unique Ferrari Luce “Chassis 0” was sold at Monterey Car Week for an astonishing $40 million, around £30 million, setting a world record for a new car sold at auction. The proceeds are going to educational projects through the Ferrari Foundation, so at least somebody has managed to spend £30 million on a car and emerge looking reasonably public spirited.

In this episode of Mark and Pete, we ask whether an electric Ferrari can really still be a Ferrari. For generations, the Prancing Horse has meant noise, petrol, cylinders, exhausts and that unmistakable Ferrari engine note. The Luce has none of those. Instead Ferrari has developed a system which uses the genuine vibrations and sounds of the electric drivetrain to give the car its own character. No recorded V12 noises being piped through the speakers, thankfully. There are limits.

The numbers are certainly Ferrari-ish. The 1,036 bhp Ferrari Luce does 0–62 mph in around 2.5 seconds, has a 122 kWh battery and, unusually for Ferrari, has four doors and five seats. Former Apple design chief Jony Ive was involved in creating the interior, which rather pleasingly includes proper physical controls instead of turning the entire dashboard into an enormous touchscreen.

But Ferrari itself is being cautious. It now expects fully electric cars to make up only around 20% of its range by 2030, rather than the 40% previously envisaged.

So is the Ferrari Luce a glimpse of the supercar future, an engineering masterpiece, or a beautifully made solution to a problem Ferrari owners never actually had?

And if you had £440,000 spare, would you buy the electric Prancing Horse, or demand twelve cylinders and some proper noise?

Tomato sauce spill, Swaffham traffic, Norfolk news, lorry accidents, road closures and one enormous quantity of ketchup are the unlikely ingredients in this episode of Mark and Pete. Because sometimes the great machinery of world affairs pauses for a moment and Britain gives us the news story we actually need.

A truck carrying tomato sauce overturned near Swaffham in Norfolk, spilling its load across the road and leaving emergency services with the sort of clean-up operation nobody quite expects when they start a shift.

Yes. A truck load of tomato sauce.

There was disruption. There was a road closure. There was an impressive amount of red stuff where red stuff really shouldn't be. And somewhere, presumably, there was a very unhappy person looking at several thousand meals' worth of tomato sauce spreading itself across Norfolk.

Naturally, Mark and Pete approach this important breaking story with the journalistic seriousness it deserves.

Which isn't very much.

We ask whether motorists were able to ketchup with the traffic, whether police managed to get to the sauce of the problem, and whether stranded drivers were left stewing while the clean-up operation got under way. Did anyone relish the challenge? Was the driver in a pickle? And why, at the crucial moment, was there apparently no articulated lorry carrying several tonnes of chips coming in the opposite direction?

An opportunity missed.

But beneath all this nonsense, and there is quite a lot of nonsense, there's something rather wonderful about British local news. The world may be worrying about wars, elections, artificial intelligence and the future of civilisation, but somewhere in Norfolk a road is covered in tomato sauce and somebody has to sort it out.

Count Binface, Nigel Farage, the Clacton by-election, UK politics, protest voting and the strange state of British democracy are under discussion in this episode of Mark and Pete. Because something rather extraordinary has happened in Clacton. Count Binface, a man wearing a silver costume with what appears to be a bin on his head, came second.

And not just “came second” in the sense of receiving 87 votes, including his mum and somebody who misunderstood the ballot paper. He received nearly 9,500 votes, around 27 per cent of those cast.

Nigel Farage comfortably won the Clacton by-election, taking more than 22,000 votes and around 63 per cent of the total. But with Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats not fielding candidates, thousands of voters faced an unusual choice. And an awful lot of them apparently looked at Count Binface and thought: yes. That'll do nicely.

So why did people vote for him?

We look at the long and rather glorious British tradition of satirical election candidates, from the Monster Raving Loony Party onwards, and ask whether voting for a comedy candidate is merely a joke or actually quite a serious form of political protest.

Because there is something going on here.

British voters are increasingly dissatisfied with mainstream politics, political parties and politicians themselves. A vote for Count Binface can be funny, certainly, but it can also mean: none of you represents me. It is rather more emphatic than spoiling the ballot paper and considerably more entertaining.

We also examine who Count Binface actually is, where the character came from, his previous election campaigns and some of his splendidly ridiculous manifesto promises. Then comes the obvious constitutional question.

Could Count Binface become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

Technically, Britain doesn't directly elect a Prime Minister at all. The Prime Minister must be able to command the confidence of the House of Commons. There is, as far as we can establish, no constitutional prohibition on having a waste-paper basket for a head. Westminster has somehow neglected to legislate for this contingency.

But underneath the jokes is a serious question about British democracy, protest votes, Nigel Farage, Reform UK and public trust in politics.

When more than a quarter of voters choose the man dressed as an intergalactic space warrior, perhaps the interesting question isn't why they voted for the joke candidate.

Perhaps it's who the joke is on.

Mark and Pete: faith, life, current affairs and the occasional bin-headed parliamentary candidate.zz