The art of politics: what ministers hang on their walls

On the walls of the Chancellor’s office hangs a print of Eric Ravilious’s lithograph ‘Working Controls while Submerged’ (1941). Two engineers in blue overalls heave the levers of a submarine. A third slumps asleep on a bench. An image, perhaps, of the ship of state, several hundred feet underwater, but by no means sunk yet. We might picture Rishi Sunak in the Treasury control room, changing the gears, working the pumps, keeping the country bumping along even at the bottom of the economic ocean.

Or perhaps Sunak looks at his four framed screen-prints by the artist Justine Smith — ‘Pound’, ‘Euro’, ‘Dollar’, ‘Yen’ — and thinks: if only it were so easy just to print money. Maybe he turns to the portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone (after Millais) and asks: ‘Well, chaps, what would you do?’

A raid on the Government Art Collection is a perk of being a minister. Better than the car and driver, better than the polished red box. If I am ever appointed to one of the Great Offices of State — stranger things have happened to Spectator hacks — the first thing I’d do is furnish my office. A few Hogarth engravings, a set of David Jones’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ etchings, Cedric Morris’s ‘Irises and Tulips’, Edward Bawden’s ‘The Coal Exchange’… I’d have liked to nab Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Flower Piece’, if only Carrie hadn’t got there first.

A Freedom of Information request from James Heale, The Spectator’s diary editor, has lifted the little red velvet curtains on which works of art ministers have got from the vaults. Mr and Mrs Johnson are the most prolific borrowers, having signed out 44 worksfor the Prime Minister’s flat at No. 11. Their eclectic selection is of a piece with their Lulu Lytle interiors style — a bit of this, a bit of that, a busy mix, luxury clutter.