RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: John Lewis: Never knowingly undervalued… until now

The Queen Mum was fond of quoting 19th-century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot’s wise words on monarchy: You should never let daylight in on magic.

Same goes for making sausages. So whenever anyone asks how I manage to churn out this column twice a week, I tend to reply: Put on The Kinks and start typing.

But I’m going to bend the rules for a day, even though I’d never presume to pretend that what I do is in any way comparable to the divine right of kings. I’m more in the sausage machine business.

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. And Rule One of columning is: never forget who you’re writing for.

‘For as long I can remember, John Lewis has been the patron saint of Daily Mail Land, especially since St Michael of Marks & Sparks started serving up ridiculously expensive LGBTQWERTY+ sandwiches instead of six-packs of reasonably priced knickers’

So yesterday, as most mornings, started with me sitting on my John Lewis stool, at our John Lewis breakfast bar, in our John Lewis kitchen, sipping strong coffee from a John Lewis mug and munching a bacon and egg banjo, cooked in a John Lewis frying pan on a John Lewis hob and served on a John Lewis plate.

My guess is that a fair proportion of you reading this column could say pretty much the same. For as long I can remember, John Lewis has been the patron saint of Daily Mail Land, especially since St Michael of Marks & Sparks started serving up ridiculously expensive LGBTQWERTY+ sandwiches instead of six-packs of reasonably priced knickers.

I’d been reading about the upheavals at the John Lewis Partnership, which has been as hard hit as other retailers by the pandemic and the shift to online ordering.

Chairman Sharon White is considering diluting the company’s staff-owned co-operative model as she attempts to attract investment from outside investors. Since 1950, the company has been jointly owned by its employees, who have been able to top up their salaries with annual bonuses.

Lately, however, with the slump in footfall on High Streets caused by Covid and rip-off parking charges by ravenous local councils, the bonuses have dried up. Stores have been forced to close for good, including the flagship Birmingham Bull Ring branch, which was opened in a blaze of glory just a few years ago.

First Ken Bruce, now John Lewis. It feels like another of those ‘Day they knocked down the Palais’ moments.

As a matter of principle, we’ve always tried to use local businesses for everything from blinds to bird baths.

But when it’s come to the big stuff, the only place to turn has been John Lewis.

The staff are as good as it gets, almost certainly because they have been incentivised by having skin in the game.

We’re halfway between the Brent Cross and Welwyn Garden City branches. I used to go to the John Lewis restaurant at Brent Cross — The Place To Eat, smoked salmon bagels a speciality — with my mum. She loved it. On a clear day you can see the flyover at Staples Corner.

John Lewis has been a North London landmark since it was the anchor tenant of Britain’s first indoor shopping mall in 1976. Whenever he got lost, my dear old friend the sports writer and FA Cup historian Mike Collett, who grew up in nearby Hendon and has the world’s worst sense of direction, would head for the John Lewis car park to get his bearings and navigate his way home.

Another Hendon native, the novelist Shirley Conran, was a big fan, too.

After ULEZ is extended beyond the North Circular, Brent Cross’s loss is going to be Welwyn’s gain. Let’s hope the Welwyn branch survives that long.

Things are pretty grim in the wonderful world of Grace Brothers and beyond. MailOnline has just published a cut-your-wrists gallery of boarded-up shops in London’s Oxford Street, which have all gone under in the past few years.

So Sharon White can’t be criticised for trying to inject more money into John Lewis, even if that means watering down the employee partnership deal. But instead of diversifying the company’s portfolio, such as building John Lewis-branded flats — which sound a bit like the ‘luxury’ apartments in Rwanda being touted by Home Secretary Sue Ellen Braverman — she should take another look at the core business which has always underpinned its success.

Chairman Sharon White (pictured) is considering diluting the company’s staff-owned co-operative model as she attempts to attract investment from outside investors

While sitting on my John Lewis stool yesterday, I listened — as is my habit — to the excellent LBC breakfast show presented by Nick Ferrari, talk radio’s equal of Ken Bruce and, I know he won’t be offended, a sort of wireless version of John Lewis. Ferrari is where Daily Mail Land goes for its morning news fix, as the BBC’s Today programme disappears further down a miserable Guardianista rabbit hole.

Yesterday’s Ferrari phone-in was all about the plight of John Lewis, and highlighted where the company has been going wrong in recent years.

We can discount the gormless woman caller who complained, Greg Dyke-style, that John Lewis was hideously white and middle class, completely overlooking the fact Sharon White is one of Britain’s most prominent and successful black female executives.

More instructive was the bloke from Surbiton (where else?) who complained that he had to walk through a sushi bar staffed by seven people before he could get anywhere near the undercrackers department to buy a pair of Y-fronts.

That could have been me talking — which is probably why I buy my John Lewis pants online these days. Who the hell wants to be confronted with raw fish first thing in the morning?

Other callers grumbled that Waitrose — JLP’s upscale supermarket arm — had lost the plot, too, knocking out increasingly expensive faddish foodstuffs to people who can’t even pronounce ‘quinoa’ while getting eaten alive on the basics by cut-price German juggernauts Aldi and Lidl.

So I wish Sharon White every success in enticing Howard and Hilda back into her stores — but not at the expense of alienating one of the most motivated and professional workforces the retail trade has ever known.

As she tries to reinvent the wheel, she should remember the old adage about babies and bathwater. And ask why the hell John Lewis ever jettisoned its famous, trustworthy slogan: Never knowingly undersold.

She should also recall Carrie Johnson’s caustic, sneering remarks about the ‘John Lewis nightmare’ Theresa May left behind in the Downing Street flat.

Actually, Mother Theresa’s taste in soft furnishings was about all she had in common with the people of Middle England she purported to represent.

And if Carrie’s husband Boris had paid more attention to the John Lewis Tendency and less to the cosmopolitan Lulu Lytle brigade, he might still be Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, I shall retire to my John Lewis leather armchair with a large VAT in a John Lewis tumbler, a Cumberland sausage sandwich from Waitrose and relax in front of my John Lewis TV (five-year extended guarantee included at no extra cost). But what to watch?

After the Inspector Morse spin-off Endeavour ended, what else?

It has to be Lewis.

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