John Lewis Isn’t ‘Good Enough’ For Boris Johnson, But It’s Definitely Good Enough For Us

Of the many leaks that have come out about Boris Johnson in the last week, him allegedly using £58,000 of Tory donations for flat renovations is the one nobody can quite move on from. You’ll have noted that this morning on social media when John Lewis was trending, all because the grandiosity of Johnson’s taste meant John Lewis furniture simply wasn’t ‘good enough’ for his Downing Street apartment.

That’s right. When the refurbishment of the flat was first reported by Tatler, it was said that the pair wanted to transform Theresa May's 'John Lewis furniture nightmare' into a 'high society haven.'

‘We know he wanted to upgrade his flat because he didn't think John Lewis furniture was good enough,’ Labour's shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth told Sky News today. ‘I think John Lewis furniture is pretty good actually, pretty posh stuff.’

‘Yesterday he said he paid for it, overnight we had reports that the Tory party head office paid for it,’ Ashworth continued. ‘We know they were asking businesspeople to fund it - we need to know whether he's had a loan from somebody, is he paying it back to them, is he paying it back to them with interest, and who he is beholden to. Because somebody has funded his sofas, his bedding, and the bed he sleeps in at night, we need to know if that person has an interest in government policy, whether that person has an interest in winning government contracts.’

That’s the biggest issue, of course, that Johnson potentially used unethical means to pay for his renovations – but the John Lewis slander is what everyone is particularly stuck on. So much so, ‘Boris Johnson furniture’, ‘Carrie Symonds John Lewis’ and ‘Boris Johnson flat refurb’ are all breakout search terms on Google Trends right now – meaning everyone is Googling to know more about just how snobby Johnson was about John Lewis.

Because Ashworth it right – John Lewis might not be posh to an upper-class Tory with family wealth, but for the rest of us, John Lewis furniture is more than ‘good enough’. Incidentally, there are beds on the John Lewis website for £7,600, fridge freezers for £5,300 and sofas for £4,200.

And now the nation has jumped to the department stores defence online, with tweet after tweet about what this tells us about the prime minister, why he thinks he’s too good for a shop that defines the high street for so many and why John Lewis actually provides great, aspirational furniture for the people this man is meant to represent.

When you think about it, we really shouldn't be surprised that Johnson would have such a classist attitude to an actually-quite-posh department store. Just because he doesn't brush his hair, wears clothes till they unravel and bases his entire personality on loving pints doesn't change the extremely privileged life he's led. To be honest, all of those old-money archetypes actually make him the poshest of all.

We should take this as yet another reminder not to be fooled by his clumsy clown persona, he still looks down on the way the rest of us live - even those of us that can actually afford to shop at John Lewis.

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