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.
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