Like Boris, I’m haunted by John Lewis shame

It is time to own up. I am living the nightmare — the “John Lewis furniture nightmare”. It’s not all down to the one department store: there is a smattering of the Sofa Workshop massacre and even a little bit of the “that pine shop in Chiswick horror”. But fundamentally, ever since those hours in Oxford Street assembling our wedding list, we have been secretly living with this torment.

In the weeks after a Tatler piece on the refurbishment of the prime minister’s Downing Street flat offered the injudicious, unattributed remark that Boris Johnson and fiancée Carrie Symonds were spending thousands to free themselves of the “John Lewis furniture nightmare” their predecessors had installed, I had hoped the shame would pass.

Surely the remark would be forgotten, casually cast aside along with other meaningless utterances such as “there’ll be no border down the Irish Sea”. And yet, with the flare-up of the row over the trust fund the prime minister tried to set up to finance his chaise-longue life, it is clear the issue is not going away. While others are rightly focused on questions of propriety, all I can think of is the mortification of falling short in the home-furnishings department.

Our bare magnolia lounge walls, which once seemed unobtrusively tasteful, are now a constant reproach to my lack of style, as is the humiliating absence of rattan.

I am left yearning for the migraine-inducing patterns of the Lulu Lytle wallpaper so admired by the first fiancée and which I, in my ignorance, had mistaken for the before-image of a Magic Eye puzzle.

Not only is the downstairs a monument to our unrefined middle-class taste, I must also admit to being a letdown in the bedroom: we got our king-size from Dreams on the A40. Oh, the shame.

And frankly, it is clear that we can no longer live with it. The PM has shown us the way. It doesn’t matter that I can’t afford to spend £58,000 on my home furnishings; neither could he. But did he let that stop him? Did he give in to the gloomsters and doomsters who said it could not be done? When people told him he could not have an Apothecary Lamp from Lytle’s Soane Britain store, did he slink off to Ikea? Hell no, he tried to get someone else to pay it.

This is the can-do message we all need to heed. Not only is there nothing wrong with extravagant taste if you can afford it: there is nothing wrong with it even if you can’t. Dominic Cummings may have said it was “unethical” and “foolish” but, frankly, that’s why he had to go. You can’t have people standing in the way of progress and Johnson’s mission — we now know — is to rescue the whole country from the John Lewis nightmare. He is levelling up, room by room.

Some people might be weak enough to be irritated at the thought of the first couple sneering at what, for most of us, might pass for rather nice decor. Some might see it as politically damaging and, you know, kind of metropolitan elitist. But the man is leading us by example to a higher aesthetic plane. After all, he had an allowance of £30,000 to refurbish his flat to make it look less like somewhere Theresa May might wish to live. And while a fickle few might also be weak enough to think that’s quite a lot of money, this man has bigger ambitions for Britain.

I am, I admit, not entirely sure how I will raise the cash for our own Lulu Lytle makeover. Thus far, friends and contacts have been slow to cough up for our refurbishment trust fund, asking why they should buy me a new sofa. It’s not as if I can get them a government contract.

But if there is one thing Johnson has shown us, it is that we must not let our vision be constrained by anything so mundane as economics. We have to be open to new thinking. I noticed last week that MI5 has launched its own Instagram page, so clearly it is attempting to blag its Lulu Lytle furniture by becoming a social media influencer.

The PM is building back better and he is starting at home. Like him, I will find a way to escape my unacceptable taste. If we follow his lead then, who knows, one day soon we may all be in Lulu-land.

Follow Robert on Twitter @robertshrimsley and email him at robert.shrimsley@ft.com

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