Well that was a funny old week.
Not a lot of laughs, but funny, nonetheless, what with the government deciding unilaterally to beggar about with international law over Irish border checks; Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond’s ongoing breakup; Harry and Meghan’s soap Oprah and Chancer Sunak reckoning that the only way to get the nation out of bed and back to paying its way is to “encourage” richer people to pay just a smidgeon more tax.
If they feel like it. And only if they really want to. And not for a wee while. No pressure, folks. He’s not going to set Marcus Rashford on you. Just yet.
And speaking of beds (tangentially), charity, it seems, now very firmly begins at home. Depending, of course, on whose home it is.
Lockdown blues or White with a Touch of Anti-Depressant?
In the aftermath of the budget, there is much talk, not only of the mega-billions of government borrowing, continued furloughing and not a penny more for the NHS, but also of the news that the Prime Minister’s Significant Other, Ms Carrie Symonds, is planning a six-figure refurb of their obviously deeply substandard SW1 gaff.
With a helping hand and/or leg-up, depending on your viewpoint from the top or the foot of the decorator’s ladder, from a charity to be founded for that very purpose.
The existing fund of 30 grand or so obviously just won’t cut the mustard in terms of escritoires and Quooker taps.
I know, I know, lockdown-itis has struck everyone, that feeling that we ought to have something to show for all that time spent within our own four walls.
Painting them an uplifting tint of White with a Touch of Anti-Depressant seems the least we can do.
But expecting charitable donations to rag-roll your cludgie or touch up the 50 Shades of Dulux adorning your bijou master suite? You’re having a laugh, even if the usually rollicking PM is rumoured to be having trouble making fiscal ends meet on his paltry parliamentary stipend.
Perhaps he’s worrying about eventually having to pay it all back, a la the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, when he and his current nearest and dearest vacate the premises with a post-electoral view to becoming “self-financing” in foreign parts.
Or maybe, like them, he can palm it off onto one of his relatives, if the American-style dynastic approach to political leadership takes off here.
After all, it must, wouldn’t you say, be hard living with someone else’s dream décor even if, like me, you dream of many things but décor doesn’t tend to be one of them.
The previous incumbents of No 10 (or is it 11? I’ve lost count and interest) obviously didn’t lift a finger to upscale.
Maybe Mr and Mrs May, who might just have had better things to do, were happily oblivious to all the stuff copiously added by the previous tenants
I mean, what could that Samantha Cameron know about design, just being an art school graduate, creative director of a design company and founder of her own fashion line?
The place must have looked like a houndsditch. So out with the not-very-old and in with the carefully distressed new, I say…as does Ms Symonds, if rumour is to be believed.
You’d think anyone living at the heart of contemporary British politics would be a dab hand at a bit of creative white-washing but obviously, Ms Symonds is averse to donning the boiler suit and having at the dado rails with a nicely contrasting matchpot.
She has people to do that for her, to wit, her designer of choice who apparently goes by the exciting name of Lulu Lytle.
What Ms Lytle comes up with for the present Mr and (not quite) Mrs Big of British politics remains to be seen, although probably not by most of us, even if we have chipped in a quid or two from our extra £20 of Universal Credit to save Boris’s built-in trouser-press for the nation.
She is known (by whom I am uncertain; I do not move in those circles) for her “antique-inspired” vision, which is apparently just bung full of what is described as “interior necessities.”
‘The sort of man who buys his own furniture’
I trust it is not too churlish to assume that her idea of interior necessities and those essential to the wider nation might not have much in common. And common this house is so not going to be.
This is Downing Street, remember, not Downton Abbey but there is a distinct trace around of arch-snob Alan Clark whose class-ridden diaries sneered at Michael Heseltine, for many the absolute epitome of a Tory grandee, as the sort of man who buys his own furniture.
Ms Symonds is apparently fighting this domestic rearguard action in the name of ridding the place of its “John Lewis furniture nightmare”. Thus I suspect we will not see Ms Lytle’s acolytes, armed with suitable swatches and measurements, down the local branch of B&M or The Range any time soon.
You just can’t get the right kind of chintz for the bespoke four-poster at IKEA, you know.
