Robert Shrimsley's style trauma

In today’s edition I included a link to Robert Shrimsley’s satirical Financial Times column about the embarrassment he feels by having bought his furniture from John Lewis. Since the FT has a policy of occasionally releasing some content outside its paywall, I had assumed that this piece at least was going to be in the wild (and had checked that using an anonymous browser) but it turns out that I was wrong. Apologies for that. So here’s a short excerpt from the piece which explains what I (and Fintan O’Toole) were driving at.

“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.”