The Hooray who became a middle-class style guru

A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and was a prominent member of the hell-raising Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Both he and Cameron have classy, team-playing wives and three young children apiece. There, however, the similarity ends.

At just 45, Boden is a few years older than Cameron and diffident rather than slick. While the Tory leader embraced the world of business and spin in his early career as a PR man, Boden rejected conventional employment after a wretched few years in the City. He failed to see the point of the deal-obsessed world of stockbroking and investment banking. ‘I really didn’t get it,’ he says in the deep plummy tones so familiar to customers who ring to order the latest ‘funky cardigan’ or ‘fruity’ children’s T-shirt from the Boden catalogue.