My magic Fortnum’s moment

I admit I had a falling out with Fortnum & Mason a few years ago over its new brasserie on Jermyn Street. It replaced a restaurant that looked like a toilet-roll cover or wedding dress, and although I had never eaten there, I felt protective of it. Why was she blown away and on what wind? Why can’t London resemble, always, something unseen in a Graham Greene novel, because I want it to? It was replaced by a smooth and very expensive restaurant for rich people, which looked like every other brasserie that has opened in London since 2000. I remember it had orange banquettes. It was too Mayfair — that means too Zurich, today — and not enough St James’s. I took against it because I couldn’t imagine a Victorian child standing outside it holding a lantern on Christmas Eve, its breath warm in the air; and if I could it certainly couldn’t afford to eat there. It did an excellent seabass though.

Fortnum & Mason, you see, doesn’t really sell fashion or foodstuffs, even if they do the best scones and the best jam and the best lemon cake, and on and on. (Only its fudge, for me, has been bettered, by a man who had a stall on the South Bank long ago, and he was either a madman or a prophet.) It sells fantasy. It’s 21st-century London’s Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and the only shop I go to for pleasure. It’s a theatre where you can eat the scenery; and theatre should be for everyone. And that, I think, is why I objected to the brasserie. Fortnum & Mason isn’t, and shouldn’t be, for rich people — that is one of the reasons that UK Uncut, who ‘occupied’ it in 2012, looked less like daring revolutionaries than, as ever, middle-class idiots who don’t understand the country they think they want to save.