The PM’s ‘John Lewis nightmare’ comes at a time when Britain’s ailing city centres are bidding farewell to department stores
Boris Johnson and his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, have spent an estimated £200,000 from who knows where renovating their official flat in order to avoid the shame of being upper-class people with middle-class furnishings. It’s not surprising that their – and according to Tatler magazine their visitors’ – distaste for Theresa May’s “John Lewis furniture nightmare” seems to have attracted just as much attention as the questions over how Johnson might have paid for it.
John Lewis, like all class signifiers in Britain’s neurotic social minefield, means more than just a name: it means respectability and, by extension, middle-class acceptance. Although it’s been around for ever – it first opened in 1864 – in the last 20 years the brand has taken on ever greater social cachet. Its recentish growth mirrored New Labour’s aggressively middle-class aspirations, and the idea that the way to “rescue” declining high streets was effectively to price working-class people out of using them.
