After days of being told we don’t care about the Prime Minister lying, being crass and insensitive about death during a pandemic and fiddling public money to refurbish his flat it turns out that we do care. We care even more that he is so cross about it that he looks like a rabid dog at Prine Ministers Questions..
“Hmm,” we think, “no one looks that cross unless they actually have something to hide.”
Then we find something we care about even more. Surprisingly, it’s not corruption, lying, cronyism or practises that boarder on fraud. No. We care about taste and interior design.
How dare they diss John Lewis? Most of us can only dream of John Lewis. Most people in rented accommodation (which, after all, is all the Downing Street flat is (without the need to pay rent) haven’t even managed to get a lick of paint on their windows for 20 years but each new Prime Minister gets a budget of £30,000 of tax payer money to redecorate how he (or his partner) likes. Just think how many council house windows could be painted for £30,000. But let’s not go there. This isn’t about that. Every Prime Minister has used that budget. SamCam famously put in an IKEA kitchen. Gordon Brown said that the whole building needed to be gutted.
Now the Princess Sloan Ranger herself didn’t marry a sweaty man with more than fifty years under his flabby belt not to get the interior design of her dreams. By all accounts she stamped her foot and said, “How can I possibly entertain all my yummy mummy friends in a John Lewis lounge? I simply must have Lulu Lytle . I think you should sack the person that says we can’t spend more money!”
Even Boris thought that was a bit extreme, so he borrowed the extra money without telling anyone oh, yes, he’s paid it back now and so, apparently, we shouldn’t be too cross. But they forgot how interior design changes everything.
There is no greater signifier of social class. The very rich have a certain lampshade and after a while that design gets to John Lewis because the middle classes aspire to richness and eventually it gets to Peacocks, so everybody with disposable income can have it. Suddenly even the people who buy from John Lewis think it’s tacky and the very rich have moved on.
I’ve had a look at Soane Britain’s website (Lulu Lytle’s company) and I think we all need to be very afraid. As someone who lived through the Seventies, I can say that none of us want to go back to that. Big prints in earthy tones, tiger heads on the wall and pictures of blue women with moving waterfalls in the background should stay in the past. It’s no coincidence that when most people had a chance to decorate like that the trend didn’t last long. I have noticed that wicker is a strong feature in her designs. This was also popular in the Seventies. So much so that many of my primary school DT lessons involved soaking willow and bending back and forth through a frame to make a basket. I still have those skills so if you aspire to the kind of interior the Prime Minister bought for a lot more than £30,000 then I can help. I have a load of Tunnocks Teacakes wrappers saved too.
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