The ‘John Lewis nightmare’ shows just how out of touch Boris Johnson is
John Lewis #JohnLewis
Some stories touch the nation at a level above politics, somewhere nearer the self; Boris Johnson’s renovations to his Downing Street flat is one. Had it just been a pile of numbers, it’s possible that even his most ardent opponents would have lost interest. Yes, a £30,000 annual allowance for refurbishments sounds like more than any normal person could dream of spending. Sure, there’s £58,000 he spent on top of that to account for – donated by Lord Brownlow, but after what shenanigans, and what was all that about a blind trust?
Yet in the jumble of missing puzzle pieces, boring parliamentary rules over declarations, and the odd commentator dragging up tax and interest – words designed to stifle curiosity – this could have died down. Electoral commission investigation notwithstanding, consider the context: a prime minister who nobody expected to tell the truth or manage his personal affairs with probity in the first place.
If only the quotes hadn’t been so magnetic; as the Daily Mail has reported, the prime minister bemoaned to aides that Carrie Symonds’s gold wallpaper was “costing tens and tens of thousands … I cannot afford it”. Reading this in a script, a diligent editor would say, “Why is he having that conversation with an aide? Why can’t he talk directly to his girlfriend about whether they have tens of thousands in their bank account?” Their relationship suddenly looks somewhat darker and much less relatable.
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Even though Samantha Cameron had only just installed a new kitchen – sure, it’s a long time ago in politics, but it’s not a very long time in the life cycle of a lacquered unit – Carrie couldn’t live with it, according to a “friend”, because it was “greige” (this has particular connotations in the world of interiors, I understand – a kind of dated-hotel-chic). The killer, of course, was one visitor recalling Symonds’s desperation to see the back of Theresa May’s “John Lewis nightmare”.
The headline offence is snobbery: to the vast majority of Conservative voters, possibly just about all of them, John Lewis furniture represents something of a pinnacle. To homeowners, John Lewis is the idealised court portrait of the Ikea flat pack they actually bought; to renters, it is a world away from landlord-assembled tat. It makes Johnson and Symonds seem scornful, remote and painfully clueless about the lives of their compatriots.
This is particularly problematic in the light of the still-denied “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” remark. It’s all clicking together like Lego, another horribly common yet universally coveted thing Carrie probably can’t abide. A man who didn’t care whether people lived or died probably would end up with a woman who thought John Lewis – John Lewis! – was for little people. Furthermore, Johnson’s best counterattack strategy to all the recent sleaze allegations has been a version of “people don’t care about silly stories, they care about the vaccine rollout”. After this saga, it’s fair to say that he doesn’t have a clue what any of us care about.
Some of the shock at this snobbery is confected: many were probably already aware that Posh is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. They don’t even have department stores. Alan Clark’s famous (though contested) slur on Michael Heseltine’s breeding – “The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy his own furniture” – is the touchstone of the aristocratic interiors-worldview. Their furniture is all 300 years old, and it emphatically does not blend into their wallpaper. They never have any draught exclusion and their plumbing doesn’t work.
Alan Clark, faced with an interior by Symonds’s favoured designer, Lulu Lytle, might have found it gaudy and crass, but also unspeakably arriviste, as he would any sofa whose springs weren’t digging into his butt. Even though we’ve yet to see pictures of the inside of Downing Street (give the Mail a break, it is trying to bring down a prime minister here), we can probably guess from Lytle’s look book that what we’d see is not timeless English class, but a billionaire oligarch’s idea of what an aristocratic English interior should look like. Johnson and Symonds are not seeking to visually represent their own class. They’re flogging a theme park version of it – two parts Raj, one part boho, two parts anteroom from the set of The Crown – to the world of the High Net Worth, a world to which the views of Alan Clark, John Lewis, all its partners, and the assorted citizenry of this sceptred isle could not be less relevant. The flat, and how it was paid for, is actually not a bad metaphor for Johnson’s politics.