Way back in the noughties, Charles Moore observed that the Conservatives could learn a lot from the Boden story. ‘An individualistic, non-hierarchical, girly, aspirational, southern, 40 per cent internet-based, middle-class business, laid back but hard-headed. Yet, at the same time, it is quite traditional […] the way of life he is promoting is instinctively conservative’, Moore concluded. Of course, this was back in Boden’s heyday, when the mail-order catalogue company routinely posted an increase in sales year upon year, back when David Cameron was spotted wearing its floral boardshorts on holiday in 2008, and when the company was synonymous with the middle-class good times: drinks at the yacht club on the Isle of Wight, Sunday lunch in Oxfordshire, Christmas parties in the side-return empires of Wandsworth. Founded in 1991 with an inheritance from a childless uncle, Boden soon became a middle-class juggernaut, expanding into the US, France and Germany, all without a single physical shop to its name.

At one point, I even........

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