Decor without decorum – this is home economics,
Johnson-style
Marina Hyde
The lavish No 10 flat refurb flouts a basic rule the
rest of us live by: if you can’t pay for something, you can’t have it
Boris
Johnson and Carrie Symonds
‘Maybe
Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds planned to do an at-home photoshoot with
Tatler or something, so the boring little Conservative party members with their
supposedly “nightmare” John Lewis furniture could see what their party
subscriptions had paid for. Akmen/AFP/Getty Images
Tue 27 Apr 2021
15.43 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/27/decor-home-economics-johnson-no-10-flat-refurb
Well, I for
one won’t be happy until I see Dominic Cummings in a rattan armchair, looking
right at Oprah Winfrey and saying: “Thank you for asking how I am. Not many
people have asked if I’m OK.”
Ever since
Cummings stepped back from duties last year, it has been clear there is a
certain amount of hurt between him and his former brothers-in-arms. But events
of the past few days have revealed just how deep that bitterness runs. God
forbid Michael Gove is taken from this earthly realm any time soon, but if it
did happen I hope that Peter Phillips would be available to walk between
Dominic and Boris Johnson at the funeral. It goes without saying that their
rift would have devastated Princess Diana. In 2017, the princess’s former
psychic healer told the Daily Express that Diana had been in touch to inform
her she would have voted Brexit. The princess backed leave, said her medium,
“because Britain was really great before the EU. That’s the only political
thing she’s ever said – because she loved the country.”
If any of
the above feels absurd to you, please consider just how much more absurd it is
that the actual prime minister decided to ignite a war with his crazy ex-spad.
Boris Johnson had better hope the polling public decides that he’s the royal
family in all of this, and not the Meghan-and-Harry.
And so to
the Johnson-Symondses’ apparent belief that No 10 Downing Street was some kind
of hovel. Remember, prime ministers can spend £30,000 a year – a year! – doing
up this flat, which, owing to the churn in personnel, gets done up fairly
frequently anyway. You also get to spend your weekends at a fully staffed
stately home. Chequers is, of course, where Boris chose to skip various Cobra
meetings as the pandemic closed in.
Yet I’ve
lost count of how many well-sourced stories there have been about poor old
Johnson’s “money troubles” during the past pandemic year. They simply never
stop. Read the room, guys! The only hard-luck tale people would have found more
affecting was Prince Harry’s story of being “financially cut off” aged 36,
forced to buy emergency $20m accommodation in the California billionaires’
enclave of Montecito.
Michael
Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, once declared that a picture of Ed Miliband’s kitchen
told you “all you needed to know” about the then Labour leader as a human
being. Maybe you can tell the same amount about Johnson and his fiancee from
the way they’ve gone about their own interior designs. I’m afraid that whatever
the weird loans/donations/retrofitted hokey cokey that led to the PM spaffing
up to £200,000 on his flat, one thing is crystal clear. Boris and Carrie’s
lavish redecoration scheme was undertaken by two people apparently refusing to
accept the most basic rule of home economics that the rest of the country has
to work under. Namely: if you can’t pay for something, then you can’t have it.
The prime
minister and his fiancee didn’t think such a rule was for them, and here we
are. As indicated, they are not exactly helped by the backdrop against which
all this was taking place. It seems pretty grotesque that while Johnson was
delivering hard-nosed little homilies about why he couldn’t extend free school
meals, he himself was indulging in truly feckless luxury interiors spending.
Maybe Boris
and Carrie planned to do an at-home photoshoot with Tatler or something, so the
boring little Conservative party members with their supposedly “nightmare” John
Lewis furniture could see what their party subscriptions had paid for. Or maybe
some nice businessman was going to buy it all for them as a no-strings-attached
present. We don’t know, as it hasn’t been comprehensively disclosed. What we do
know is that when Peter Mandelson was revealed to have taken an undisclosed home
loan, Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson was positively rapturous about his
sacking: “In the Ministry of Sound,” he wrote, “the tank-topped bum boys blub
into their Pils … for Mandy is dead, dead ere his prime!”
Can’t
believe the guy who wrote that turned out to be a shit. Honestly, what were the
chances? Perhaps that’s yet another question for the cabinet secretary, Simon
Case, a sensationally unimpressive man whose appeal to Johnson (who appointed
him) was made abundantly clear as he stonewalled his way through a select
committee appearance on Monday. Simon not-on-the-Case, more like. Britain’s
most senior civil servant seems to be conducting about 37 interminable reviews
or inquiries into the inevitable implications of a serial liar and newspaper
columnist leading a country at a time of crisis (I paraphrase only slightly).
Maybe he’s trying to create one Whitehall internal affairs job for every 100
that’ll be lost thanks to Johnson’s calamitous failure to understand that
optimising for health and the economy were the same thing.
As for
where all this will or won’t lead, one of the worst aspects of British
political life is that no piece of alleged wrongdoing is permitted to emerge
without a load of the in-crowd rushing to the airwaves to explain loftily how
the out-crowd don’t understand or care about it. Talking about whether people
are really talking about something now accounts for about 80% of the
commentator economy. In not so many words, these know-alls suggest the public
are too thick or busy surviving for whatever it is to “cut through” – more
in-group lingo – which probably doesn’t end up being the anti-elitist look they
were going for.
The
Conservatives are doing rather a lot of this at the moment. If Johnson did make
the remark about allowing the bodies to pile up, opined his biographer Andrew
Gimson, it will simply “strengthen his reputation as a man who talks as a man
in the pub would”. Elsewhere, I very much enjoyed Thérèse Coffey’s
haute-Ladybird book explanation of the flat saga for Sky News viewers this
morning. As the work and pensions secretary put it: “These sorts of things
often get tidied up in something called the annual accounts.” Something called
the annual accounts … Okaaaaay, Thérèse, I THINK I get it? Just about? You’ve
gone on something called a television to tell something called the public that
something called money is normally featured in something called the annual
accounts? Sorry, we’re probably being idiots – does that sound right? Also: let
us know when the prime minister tidies up the accounts of how many
something-called-kids he has.
Maybe the
geniuses of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street will keep insulting the public’s
intelligence. But you don’t have to be in with the in-crowd to have a stake in
politics or a deep understanding of how you’re viewed. I keep reading that
Dominic Cummings “knows where the bodies are buried”. Unfortunately, so
do 127,000 families.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Electoral Commission launches inquiry into Boris
Johnson flat refurb
Watchdog
say there are ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may
have occurred’
Keir Starmer attacks ‘Major Sleaze’ Boris Johnson
over ‘cash for curtains’ row
Labour leader’s attack on PM came an hour after
Electoral Commission launched inquiry into No 11 refurbishment
Aubrey
Allegretti Political correspondent
@breeallegretti
Wed 28 Apr
2021 13.23 BST
A furious
Boris Johnson tried to fight off allegations he broke donation reporting rules,
as Sir Keir Starmer branded him “Major Sleaze” in the “cash for curtains” row
increasingly engulfing the prime minister.
An hour
after the Electoral Commission launched an investigation and said there were
“reasonable grounds” to suspect payments for renovations to Johnson’s Downing
Street flat could constitute several offences, the prime minister was accused
of focusing on petty personal issues instead of the pandemic.
Starmer
said Johnson had been found to be nipping out to choose wallpaper at more than
£800 a roll and phoning newspaper editors to “moan” about his former adviser
Dominic Cummings, and accused the government of being “mired in sleaze,
cronyism and scandal”.
In a heated
clash at prime minister’s questions, Johnson said Labour’s interest in whether
he was given or lent £58,000 to pay for a makeover to his residence was
“absolutely bizarre”, and said the “credulity of the public” was “strained to
breaking point” with Starmer’s questions.
Johnson
repeatedly refused to deny that last year he was given the cash – which has not
yet been published in any declarations. He insisted he had repaid sums to the
Cabinet Office “personally”, but dodged calls to say who had footed the initial
bill.
Tory MPs
have been privately ramping up pressure on Johnson to come clean over whether a
Tory peer donated £58,000 to fund the works to the No 11 residence he lives in
with his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, and their son, Wilfred.
Starmer
asked why Britain’s most senior civil servant, the cabinet secretary, Simon
Case, had been asked to look into the source of the payments. “Why doesn’t the
prime minister just tell him. That would be the end of the investigation,” the
Labour leader inquired.
Johnson
said: “I have covered the costs, I have met the requirements that have been
advised to me in full.” He added: “Any further declaration I have to make, if
any, I will be advised upon.”
But Starmer
said the public would be screaming at their televisions in exasperation at
Johnson refusing to directly answer the questions. He added the Conservatives
had been found to be handing out “dodgy contracts”, “jobs for their mates” and
“cash for access”.
He labelled
Johnson “Major Sleaze” – a retort to the prime minister’s moniker for him of
Captain Hindsight – and said the public deserved a prime minister they could
trust.
Raising his
voice so the sound from the microphone in front of him became distorted,
Johnson insisted he was “getting on with delivering on people’s priorities”,
and lamented: “He goes on and on about wallpaper.”
Johnson
also repeated his denial that he ever said just before the outset of England’s
second national lockdown: “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” He
called on Starmer – and the Scottish National party’s Westminster leader, Ian
Blackford, who asked if he was a “liar” – to publish the identities of the
multiple sources, to substantiate the claim.
The “cash
for curtains” row – as it has been labelled by some in Westminster – exploded
over the weekend, when Cummings published an incendiary blogpost that made
several claims of impropriety against Johnson.
Cummings
said he had told the prime minister “his plans to have donors secretly pay for
the renovation were unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly
broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations if conducted in the
way he intended”.
A
Conservative party spokesperson insisted, after the Electoral Commission
inquiry was launched, that “all reportable donations have been transparently
and correctly declared and published”, and said they would “work
constructively” with the watchdog.
Also
investigating the issue will be the government’s new adviser on ministerial
standards, Christopher Geidt. His post had been vacant for months, following
the resignation of Alex Allan, who quit when Johnson overrode his finding that
the home secretary, Priti Patel, broke the ministerial code by bullying staff.
Lord Geidt,
who was private secretary to the Queen for a decade until 2017, will begin an
immediate inquiry into the flat refurbishment payments.
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