After that old duffer Sir Peter Davis had put it in Emergency Ward 10, new boy Justin King seems to have applied the correct respiratory procedures: profits are rising and the English Patient’s market share in food sales has risen a little to around 15%, although a full recovery is still some way off with mighty Tesco controlling around 30.2% of food sales, Wal-Mart/Asda (16.7%) and Wm Morrison (11.5%).

After Davis was given his marching orders in July 2004, the newly appointed King unveiled a three-year plan dubbed “Make Sainsbury’s Great Again”. Wisely, he didn’t say by when. But last week, King was able to show that his efforts to restore Sainsbury’s once glorious reputation with shoppers are beginning to pay off. In the three months to early October, pre-tax profits were up by £1m (E1.48m, $1.74m) to £118m on sales up 5.6% to £8.9bn. Sales are up, shelves are stocked with products at more competitive prices – grocery prices have been cut by 1.4% on average – staff morale seems to be on the up and up.

How is he doing it? King has scaled back the group’s ambitious plans to automate parts of its supply chain. He has brought in-house its IT services previously outsourced to Accenture. Stores have been closed, head office jobs cut and he has suspended the rollout of its petrol station-based convenience stores meant to challenge Tesco Extra.

Sainsbury’s Bank remains a big drag with no hope of meeting its original three year profit target of reaching £90m. The bank has suffered a 68% rise in bad debts provisions to £49m on loans made in the mid-1990s. Sainsbury’s supermarkets are doing 15m customer transactions a week, 500,000 up on a year ago and its trading figures mark the third consecutive quarterly improvement.

The retail business is littered with executives who took charge of once great businesses and drove them into near terminal decline, but Davis’s terrible legacy looks behind Sainsbury now. Judi Bevan’s The Rise and Fall of Marks & Spencer, which won the WH Smith Business Book Award in 2002, told brilliantly the story of Richard Greenbury, a man gifted in many Marks & Spencer virtues, who yet managed to ruin a proud and long-lived company.

Years after his departure, Marks & Spencer is still struggling to regain its prosperity and reputation. Her more recently published book, Trolley Wars, looks at the emergence of today’s supermarket groups – Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and Morrison – and charts the dramatic changes in fortunes of great retail companies and the tough environment in which they operate.

Sainsbury opened the first self-service supermarket in Croydon in 1950. Meantime, Tesco, created and run by the fiery Jack Cohen, was already a public company and finding success based on its “pile it high, sell it cheap” strategy. Bevan describes how Sainsbury pulled ahead under John D Sainsbury, later Lord Sainsbury, in 1986, only to lose out to a revitalised Tesco under Ian [Lord] MacLaurin in 1995.

Her judgment of Peter Davis’s dismal performance as Sainsbury’s chief executive between 2000-04 is rightly damning of an executive whose contract allowed him to receive millions of pounds as compensation for loss of office from a business he had run into the ground. Davis was forced out by big institutional shareholders, the final straw being Davis’s £2.4m bonus. Their anger was not so much over the size of the bonus but because it came at a time when Davis was overseeing falls in the company’s profits, share price and market share.

But that’s now in the past. Stuart Rose answered an SOS – “Save our Stores” – put out by distressed Marks & Spencer shareholders just as Justin King rallied to Sainsbury’s. King’s challenge now is how to close the gap on Tesco, whose £2bn profits and enormous customer reach and buying power with suppliers makes it look almost unassailable. He doesn’t underestimate the task ahead nor does he believe Sainsbury is on the home stretch yet. “We will have to run as fast, if not faster,” to meet targets for 2008, he says. But the store has begun again to play to its former strengths – mainly customer trust and providing quality products at affordable prices. He’s been lucky too: Morrison’s recent troubles since taking over Safeway have worked in Sainsbury’s favour, but that won’t last for ever.

When discussing Sainsbury’s problems recently he told the BBC: “In the last 10-15 years, while others have got better, we haven’t.” His is a “back to basics” approach – to return the focus on quality food, cutting costs and ensuring the shelves are stocked. “We’ve got to get better at a faster pace than others. We have to win the race by running faster, not by expecting the other guy to trip up.”

From his office at Sainsbury’s new London headquarters, King has a uninterrupted view of the City of London. It’s the same view that the late Robert Maxwell had when head of Mirror Group newspapers. King, 44, was educated at Tudor Grange in Solihull, a grammar school that became a comprehensive while he was a pupil there. He went on to take a business degree from Bath University where he was sponsored by Lucas Electrical, at the time a leading component supplier to the car industry. He came to Sainbury from Marks & Spencer, which hired him in 2001 and put him in charge of its food business.

But he’d had a good grounding. In the early 1980s, he began developing his business pedigree after joining dog food-to-chocolate maker Mars’s graduate trainee programme, where, he says, he “got a very broad spectrum of experiences very early on”. Then, after 10 years in the branded manufacturing industry, there came a decisive moment when King joined the retailer Asda, which was then in a terrible state.

There he helped Allan Leighton and Archie Norman bring about its revival. Mars, he said, gave him good basic training. It soon became clear to him that people who had worked on both sides of the fence – for manufacturers and for retailers – were those who were going to be best equipped to trade in what he believed would become the retail environment of the 1990s and beyond.

Throughout his short tenure, Sainsbury has been plagued with rumours that the extended Sainsbury family – some of whom were disenchanted by the business under Davis – might take it private or sell it off. Takeover rumours have swirled round the company but not even private equity funds have yet proved bold enough to make a move.

There has been talk recently that Leighton, the Royal Mail chairman and King’s former boss and mentor at Asda, might mount a bid for Sainsbury. King says he doesn’t take the rumours too seriously, and he will deal with the situation when and if it arises. Colleagues say King is easy to get along with, although driven by a desire to restore Sainbury’s once great reputation with customers and shareholders. “But it’s customers he’s concentrating on at the moment,” the colleague adds.

The personable King is a family man. He says his three brothers are his best friends. “We’ve all got children at the same age. The cousins get to spend a lot of time together, which they enjoy.” Home life is important to him: a keen Manchester United supporter, he likes nothing better than watching his 10-year-old son play football and he takes his 13-year-old daughter riding. He shares his passion for sailing with his children and coaches the village football team for which his son plays.

Unless there is an important dinner or function in London which requires his attendance, he prefers to go home in the evenings to the village near Leamington Spa where he lives with his wife Claire. To achieve this he rises early and is on the road in his car at six in the morning. “I still do homework [with the children] in the evening,” King said. “I don’t take work into the house if I can possibly avoid it.”

Without any hint of self doubt, King insists that “people like me, with a varied career of working for a number of companies, who have built our careers by moving around”, are perfectly suited to sorting out Britain’s troubled retailers. “Almost inevitably when we end up doing top jobs, we end up doing them in companies that are in challenging turnaround situations,” he says.

Prospects are looking better now for Sainsbury’s than for some years. And Christmas is coming, although a few more will have to pass before shareholders get fat again. But after last week’s news they might be inclined to raise a glass and toast: long live the King!

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