John Lewis’s lovable dragon

IN between a bragfest over how many belongings he has bought from John Lewis with his famously handsome Daily Mail wages and thrilling memories of people from his life that he knows and you don’t and how they once liked shopping in the store’s Brent Cross branch, Richard Littlejohn perhaps absent-mindedly stumbled on the idea that a form of a socialism is a good idea this week.

Shurely not!

Perfect for the imaginary archetypal Mail reader living and dying in Dorset, his column is often a hopeful round of pleading that the world would be so much better if things were identical to the way they were in the Home Counties 30 or 40 years ago, before everybody got so damn woke.

And so, in a week when it emerged that John Lewis might dilute its legendary employee-owned model and bonus and shares scheme, he reminisced warmly about how often he had turned to the department store over the years.

It was a glowing review, even if he could not resist telling us that he now bought his pants online because – wait for it – you have to walk past a sushi counter to get to the underwear department in-store.

Still, he continues to buy his briefs at John Lewis because “Marks & Sparks started serving up ridiculously expensive LGBTQWERTY+ sandwiches instead of six-packs of reasonably priced knickers.”

There it is, by the way, a line – the line – about how you can add more letters to LGBT+ if you want to.

The flagship store in Oxford Street [Photo: geograph.org.uk]

Contrary to panel show opinion, I can tell you that you won’t be shot if you don’t.

Right up there with “they’re calling Christmas, winterval now”, it’s amazing how you could still go to some clubs and brand yourself as a stand-up comedian by reciting the same joke about all these letters they have now for gay people and how mad that must mean the world is.

No doubt Littlejohn would probably view our little independent house of newspapers as a classic example of wokey north London, lost in covering… ishues.

If so, he might not be able to trace a similarity between how we are run and his beloved John Lewis. The constitution of our newspapers means no director or other party can sell the titles for their own personal gain, while profits are shared between employees who work hard on every edition.

When there are no profits, we just work to cover the costs of existing as a challenging and campaigning newspapers for the readership.

The basic principle is pretty simple and a good one. Why should any company have executives bunking off to play golf every Thursday afternoon and creaming off all the benefits without any recognition of who actually generates the money on the shop floor each day?

Richard Littlejohn

It’s the sort of charming idea of sharing and working for each other which would probably work well in one of John Lewis’s adverts in fact.

Do please notice how everybody loves the selfless messages in the shop’s annual Christmas broadcasts but, once the tears for an incompetent dragon or a lonely penguin have dried, everybody generally goes back to looking out for No 1. Luckily then we now have Red Richard who seems to clearly understand that the daisy-age idea of collective effort has its rewards.

He writes this week: “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.”
(Rex Harrison voice): By jove, I think he’s got it.

The columnist goes on with a message to John Lewis’s chief executive: “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.”

It is always lovely when somebody associated with an apparent widely-different worldview comes around to the idea that with a few more workers’ rights and employees having a greater stake and a belief they can play a role in a collective future – then you might just get a more productive or, as he says, “motivated” team than one asked to sweat it out at the coal face while watching a fat cat swivel around in a leather chair.

Take us to the picket lines, Mr L.

More co-ops, more mutuals, more collectivism!