Mahonia reborn!

At the beginning of the year I gave HG instructions to 'severely prune' this bush. It is a thug, it's prickly and a damned nuisance when you touch or kneel on the leaves, so I thought that he would, in his customary style, hack it to the ground and that would be that.
Not so , and now the shrub is huge and as ugly as ever. But is flowering when there is little else in the garden and the perfume is like lily of the valley. So, should it stay or should it go?