Jim Armitage: Marks & Spencer's change at the top may not stop it from sinking

Marc Bolland spent much of the Christmas break trudging around York in his wellies, surveying the flood’s impact on Marks & Spencer’s stores.

Now he’s making an even soggier departure from the company he’s run for the past six years.

While Steve Rowe’s appointment is the right move, the timing of the announcement smells worse than a water-damaged basement.

In July, senior M&S sources were telling people like me that Bolland would be staying on for another two years.

Yet today, we’re told he informed the board in the summer that he wanted to leave in early 2016. Peculiar, no?

Communication issues aside, how Bolland must wish that he had quit immediately in the summer.

Back then, shares were flirting with 600p. It even looked as if his turnaround of general merchandise was bearing fruit.

But despite improvements to the winter ranges, sales in recent weeks have been dismal — clearly far worse than he’d feared.

M&S, which has the biggest share of the market in woollens and coats, has inevitably been hit disproportionately badly, despite Bolland’s improvements to M&S’s buying and online sales.

Few — and certainly not me — foresaw just how bad its numbers would be, even after Next’s shocker on Tuesday.

However, going forward, Bolland’s transformation of the food offering and his modernisation of the general merchandise division during his six years in charge give Rowe a decent head start.

With his energy and popularity in the company, Rowe has as good a chance as any of making M&S work again.

The trouble is, in a High Street dominated by weird weather and ever-faster fashion from discount rivals, it’s still far from clear if anyone can hold back the flood threatening M&S.