As Flatgate rumbles on, it appears the government has adopted a new communications approach to a controversy involving the Prime Minister’s spouse: send for Michael Gove’s wife. The Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine popped up on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning to firefight the situation – an interesting choice given her love of incendiary quotes in her weekly columns. Presenter Nick Robinson asked Vine what she made of the row over whether £58,000 of Tory party money was spent on renovating part of No. 10 to which the latter responded with gusto:
The thing about the whole No 10. refurbishment thing is that the Prime Minister can’t be expected to live in a skip. He has to live to a certain standard and the problem with all of these political things like this is that no one is ever prepared to bite the bullet, no one is ever prepared to say ‘Look, this building does need to be maintained, there do need to be decent furnishings, we do need to have a fund that pays for it, let’s just do it.’
Robinson pointed out that far from being a ‘skip’ Downing Street was in fact a rather nice 100 room house which had ironically benefited from Johnson’s predecessor David Cameron spending a lot of his family’s ‘own money’ on tarting it up. Johnson’s own flat renovation moreover benefited from the Cabinet Office knocking some £30,000 off the bill. Such talk did not dissuade Vine who pressed on:
Well that’s fair enough isn’t it? If the BBC was to move you to live permanently in Manchester you would expect to have a relocation fee, this man is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week trying to run the country, which is quite a difficult job to do – if he wants to have a pink sofa instead of a green sofa, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for him to want.
Steerpike is sure that those (currently) in Downing Street will be grateful to Vine for doing her best to quell the situation with her usual tact and diplomacy with the Electoral Commission announcing a ‘formal investigation’ into the Conservative Party less than two hours after her appearance.
Update: Such comments do not appear to have found favour with members of the Cameron clan, with Emily Sheffield – the former Prime Minister’s sister in law and current Evening Standard editor – now weighing in on Twitter:
Given Vine and Gove were an integral part of the Notting Hill Set during the halcyon pre-Brexit days of Cameron’s leadership, Mr S suspects such a swipe will hit close to home.
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