Lee Taylor
Lee Taylor is CEO and Founder of marketing agency Uncommon Sense.
Strip away the Sam Fender cover and the talking dog, and the commercial message of this year’s John Lewis advert is simple. If your grandchildren are rude, bored, and only interested in cash, go to John Lewis. It took Saatchi and Saatchi three minutes and a dame to make the most woke version yet.
We’ve been up and down with John Lewis over the years. Monty the Penguin made the country cry in 2014, and so did Man on the Moon a year later. Then it wandered. A few years of forgettable short films. Then last year looked like the recovery: a teenage boy, his father and a vinyl record, and not ‘the message’ in sight.
The interesting thing about this year’s family is that John Lewis didn’t invent them. They went and found them. Watch it again as a documentary rather than a commercial. The children arrive restless from a long journey and the first thing they do is fail to hug their grandmother. She brings down the old toys from the attic, and they lose interest the second someone shouts ‘lunch’. They want cash, and they look crushed when the cards turn out to be empty. The parents stand there and let it all happen. The grandmother, alone in her kitchen, concludes that the only way back into her grandchildren’s attention is to buy it. Somebody in a research group told Saatchi that this is what Christmas looks like now, and the research group was right. That is what Christmas looks like now. The ad isn’t wrong about Britain. That’s the problem.
At Christmas in the late ’80s and early ’90s you were grateful for whatever you got, because you’d been raised to be, and because the thing you’d actually been waiting for was the drive to your grandparents. Nobody needed entertaining because being together was the entertainment, and the presents were the icing on something that was already a cake. Freddie and Maggie, this year’s brats, have been handed the icing and told the icing is the point, and now everyone wonders why they’re rude.
So how did we get here? We stopped raising our children ourselves and handed the job to somebody else, and that somebody else was always going to do it worse. Every collectivist regime in history understood that the family was its rival:
Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.
Our version wears a lanyard and calls itself help for working families. Thirty free hours of childcare from nine months old. Free breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and a direction of travel under both parties for 20 years that maximises the hours a child spends in a state institution and minimises the hours they spend with their parents, driven by a Treasury whose actual interest is two earners and the tax receipts. These grandchildren are the affluent version of the same thing, outsourced to screens and ‘experiences’ rather than a council nursery, and the result is identical, because nobody at home taught them that their grandmother’s table was the point. The state didn’t raise Freddie and Maggie. It just set the terms on which everyone else did.
And then there’s the DEI casting, which is where I’m supposed to lower my voice. I won’t, because the point isn’t the one people assume. On screen it’s a white grandmother, her white daughter, a black son-in-law, and two mixed-race children. Fine. In London that’s an ordinary family. Channel 4’s own audit of the industry found that a black person appeared in 51 per cent of UK television adverts in 2024, up from 37 per cent four years earlier, in a country where black people are four per cent of the population. British advertising has over-represented ethnic minorities against the population for a decade, in every category and every ad break, not because the public asked for it but because the people who make adverts cast for awards, and because a political class told them this was the job. In 2009, Andrew Neather, a speechwriter to Blair, wrote in the Evening Standard that immigration policy since 2000 had been designed partly to “rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. This is a confession, not a conspiracy theory. Nobody is objecting to a black man in an advert, but they are objecting to being managed, and being told by the people doing the managing that the management was the point. People want to see people they recognise. I wrote about that four years ago and it’s as true now as it was then.
This brings me back to the ending, because the ad’s own solution is the final tell. Gloria doesn’t sit down and play with her grandchildren. She doesn’t teach them a card game or make them wait for lunch or tell them a story. She unlocks her home office and reveals a disco: lights, music and glitter balls, all available at John Lewis. The gift of time, delivered as a room full of stock. The disease dressed up as the cure, and it’s also the product shot. “Don’t give up on giving,” says the tagline, over two children who gave up on everything except receiving some time ago.
I don’t blame John Lewis for any of it. It held up a mirror to the country and the country doesn’t like it, and the comments being switched off tells you the brand doesn’t like it either. The ad is a three-minute portrait of what we did to our own families, who we let do it, and what the children look like afterwards. The only thing it gets wrong is the ending. There is no gran cave big enough to fix this.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
