I LOVE that Boris Johnson says he loves John Lewis. It’s like he has a check-list of things that ordinary people like. Yes, I love – casts shifty eye along list handed to him – ah, yes, that John Lewis shop.

You know our politics has gone strange when the prime minister feels moved to say he loves a particular department store. I’d wage the price of a John Lewis cashmere jumper that he’s never even been inside the place. Unlike Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who popped into a branch to look at wallpaper in a lame political stunt aimed at mocking Johnson’s expensive taste in wall coverings.

All this is wrapped up in the costly renovation of the apartment in No 11 Downing Street (see earlier Ledge reports). Oh, and Carrie Symonds, Johnson’s partner, reportedly telling friends that Theresa May left behind a “John Lewis nightmare” that just had to be removed, whatever the cost.

Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, who is married to Michael Gove, went on the BBC Today programme to say that the prime minister couldn’t be expected to live in a skip. Not sure she was helping there, but that’s what you get when Mr and Mrs Macbeth lend you their support.

I really do love John Lewis, or I did until they decided to close the store opened in York to huge fanfare only a few years ago, after much whispering of sweet nothings in the council’s ear. Now they are off, just like that, leaving a jumper-sized hole and staff without their jobs. And, whisper it in the menswear aisle, those jumpers aren’t as good as they used to be.

As for furniture, we have three pieces that I can think off. The desk that transports me to this ledge. The sofa in the conservatory where I seek inspiration in a kip. And the coffee table still too new for me to put my feet on.

There would be more, but ordinary non-toff, non-prime-ministerial people can only dream of the more expensive furniture and those nightmare fitted kitchens, and all those cheap sofas that don’t cost a fraction of the £10,000 Johnson is said to have spent on one sofa. John Lewis is the place where ordinary people would go if money wasn’t tight.

On one level, this is a story about careless privilege and posh types who break things without noticing. But it is cast in a harsher light when you see the government shoving through a Fire Safety Bill that will leave many leaseholders, not developers, lumbered with the cost for removing dangerous cladding.

That’s a true housing scandal. What have those people done to deserve that; and why were the Tories so keen to ram this bill through? As the Daily Mirror points out: “It may not be a coincidence that property tycoons gave more than £11million to the Tories between 2019 and 2020”.

That’s why worrying about sleaze matters. Favours done behind the bottles of burgundy affect how politics is conducted out on the street. Never mind ‘cash for curtains’; it should be curtains to all that cash handed over by property tycoons amid a ripple of back-slapping.