Clodagh Finn: It’s a duel to the death with arrogance, not just wallpaper

Carrie Symonds and British prime minister Boris Johnson, who have been caught up in wallpapergate.

To my shame, I googled Lulu Lytle, the designer behind the lavish refurbishment of British prime minister Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat because I simply could not visualise gold wallpaper that costs £900 a roll.

If it is crass to spend more than seven times your budget on ostentatious décor at a time when so many are struggling, it is equally crass to gawp, but then lockdown has sharpened our obsession with interiors. More than that, it has made us feel somehow entitled to snoop around the homes of politicians because the private sphere is regularly on view, partially at least, thanks to the prying lens of Zoom.

I blame Home of the Year, too, which might explain my desire to send its judges into the newly redecorated no. 11 to talk us through Lulu’s bold and exuberant designs, her love of rattan, and the sense of fun and energy apparently evident in her work.

What a happy coincidence, then, to discover that Richard Curran of The Business on RTÉ Radio 1 had a similar idea and, on Saturday morning, judge Hugh Wallace regaled listeners with a vivid description of what the prime ministerial flat might look like.

His choice of adjectives was not surprising: imperial, over-the-top, flamboyant. And even though Carrie Symonds is the one in the line of fire, this apartment will also suit Boris to a tee, he said.

It’s his hair, you see. According to Wallace, it’s modelled on the Titus, a short and choppy hairstyle popular in the Regency period which was inspired by the Roman military commander of the same name.

Elevated overtones

Given the elevated overtones, it was only a matter of time before Carrie Symonds was lazily compared to Marie Antoinette, the reviled last queen of France who was denounced for everything from her extravagance to corrupting the king. When there is a whiff of scandal, cherchez la femme, or to put it more prosaically, find a woman to blame.

Whatever you think about Symonds’s influence or her taste in soft furnishings, wallpapergate resonates far beyond London because it underlines an all-too-familiar tendency among the elected to think, act — and worse, spend — as if they were royalty.

Indeed, this is not even the first wallpapergate. In 1998, Labour leader Tony Blair’s lord chancellor, Derry Irvine, was unapologetic after spending £650,000 refurbishing his state apartments, some £59,000 of which went on hand-printed wallpaper.

At one point, he even compared himself to Henry VIII’s lord chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, showing the kind of arrogance that rightly infuriates the electorate.

We might scoff and say what a British affectation. If only it were. 

It is interesting to contrast the depth of the furore over Boris’s flat refurb with our almost silent acceptance of the extravagant lifestyle of a Fianna Fáil leader who played the squire on his palatial 18th-century estate in north Dublin.

Even if Boris and his fiancée overshot the budget by several thousand, that is small change compared to Charles Haughey’s expenditure who, on the salary of a taoiseach, bought a stately home, racehorses, and even an island.

It was a different time, of course, and he was investing in his private home as opposed to a publicly funded residence, yet you have to ask why we sheepishly accepted the prevailing narrative that this self-made man could do for the nation what he had done for himself?

Perhaps, in 1979, there was still a need to show the world that our taoiseach was not only a statesman but stately, living as he did on 260 acres at Abbeville, Kinsealy. He dined in the best restaurants, wore designer clothes — most famously spending over £15,000 of taxpayers’ money on bespoke Charvet shirts from Paris — and was regularly whisked off to his private island by helicopter.

Nobody asked how he funded his decorative programme; a lavish affair that refreshed a 12-bedroomed mansion and filled its rooms with Irish art and antiques and its wine cellar with the best wines.

For many years, we accepted that the leader of a democracy thought it fitting to pose for photographs on horseback in front of his stately pile as if he were some kind of aristocrat. It wasn’t until the Moriarty tribunal on payments to politicians that his financial dealings came to light, revealing heavy bank borrowings, political donations, most notably from Ben Dunne, as well as the shocking finding that he dipped into the liver transplant fund set up for Brian Lenihan, his close friend and adviser.

That claim is disputed by the Haughey family, but there is still more than enough in the tribunal’s findings to rival anything that might emerge about who paid the bill at Downing Street and, more importantly, what political favours they expect in return.

At least in Ireland, our tolerance had worn down by the time the hapless EU commissioner Pádraig Flynn appeared on The Late Late Show in 1999 and complained, with stonking arrogance, about struggling to maintain three homes, three cars, and a few housekeepers on his salary of £100,000 net.

“I wanna tell you something,” he said, “try it some time.”

The audience response was Arctic. The moment — TV gold — was later widely considered as the one that ended his career. It also showed that, by then, the ‘little’ people had had it with politicians who had an overblown sense of entitlement.

If anything, the intolerance of elected grandees who think they are above the rules has intensified in lockdown. 

Note that the biggest scandals of recent months were the ones sparked by politicians who arrogantly flouted public health guidelines.

Another EU commissioner fell on his own sword last August in what became known as Golfgate. Phil Hogan might, just might, have lasted the course if he had not been so slow to apologise for attending the now-infamous Oireachtas Golf Society dinner. Nothing offends quite like a politician’s swaggering hubris and sense of superiority.

That was what rankled in the North when the Sinn Féin politicians attending Bobby Storey’s funeral made little of the fact that they had turned out in such great numbers. When they did apologise, months later, they apologised not for what they had done but the offence caused.

Speaking of offensive, consider this. Just as Boris Johnson was refusing to answer questions on his over-budget refurb, the British parliament passed the post-Grenfell Fire Safety Bill which could mean leaseholders will have to pay to remove dangerous cladding from their buildings.

One woman in Bristol told a newspaper that she could face a bill of £70,000 to make her flat safe. That’s roughly a third of the cost of transforming the Downing Street flat from “John Lewis nightmare” to Lulu Lytle chic.

Boris Johnson has dismissed questions about funding the refurbishment as “trivia”, but they are not. To misquote Oscar Wilde, voters in the UK, and indeed everywhere, are not just willing to fight a duel to the death with the wallpaper but with a sense of entitlement that is still too common among politicians of all stripes.