Jim Armitage: Morrisons is starting to get its mojo back under boss David Potts

Tesco’s poor Kantar sales figures may hog the limelight, but among shrewder investors it’s Morrisons’ performance that’s causing a bigger stir.

For, though a 2% decline may look like another wheel has come off the Morrisons trolley, when you consider that this is the first month Dave “Pistol” Potts has been without his convenience stores, it starts looking a little more respectable.

Although the M Local chain was awful, some analysts reckon its absence was responsible for as much as 1.5% of today’s fall in sales.

So the core store estate, on which Potts is rightly focusing, could be outperforming its peers with a fall of only 0.5%.

There are other signs Potts is rekindling the mojo at Morrisons.

Its first petrol station store opened yesterday, and it was the first of the big chains to drop fuel prices to less than £1 a litre — a move that pushed the rest of the pack to follow suit.

Morrisons will never be a serious, Aldi-style threat to the big boys, and it takes a brave investor to buy the shares.

But it may one day prove itself an agile and quirky irritant as in the good old days under the ever-truculent Sir Ken.