John Lewis listing

John Lewis, usually Britain's Most Admired Store, has just announced a year-on-year sales decline of more than 8% in the latest reporting week, with three stores seeing sales plunge by more than 20%. The media are attributing this to belt-tightening on the part of the middle classes, though sales at JL's food subsidiary, Waitrose, actually rose 3% in the same week. Waitrose is definitely at the top end of the price range among food sellers, and there had been lots of reports that customers were flocking to Aldi and Lidl to stock up on basics.

If the Waitrose numbers continue to hold up, it looks like it will the the grocers in the middle price bracket that get squeezed. I don't find this completely illogical -- it's a lot easier to decide to go without a plasma television for the bedroom than to trade down from line-caught monkfish fillets to tinned weiners. Well, it's easier for me, anyway.

Besides, there may be another explanation for the John Lewis results. MPs have been waiting to find out whether their extravagant expense allowances for second homes, the so-called John Lewis list, might be axed. No worries, though -- the expense allowances were reaffirmed last night in a vote by, well, by the MPs themselves, actually. Really surprising outcome, that. Now they'll all head back to JL, and the results will turn around quick sharp.

Criticisms of the John Lewis list have focussed on the seemingly excessive amounts MPs are allowed to spend on everyday items. For example, they can spend £750 on a television, which gets you a pretty decent piece of kit these days. But never mind the cost: if they're as busy as they claim to be and are constantly running back and forth between Westminster and their constituencies, when do they have time to watch the box at all??

I'd like to solve the MPs' second home problem a different way. Let's put them up during the week in a nice H-block type building, preferably a tube ride away from the House of Commons. Twenty to a room. They seem to think that's good enough for the squaddies preparing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I think it should be good enough for them.