Was there ever a less convincing scandal than the revelation that a landlord who rents houses to G4S for housing asylum-seekers in Middlesbrough chooses to paint all their doors bright red? This, apparently, is ‘apartheid’, according to a hyperbolic Times headline yesterday morning. As if that were not enough, Ian Swales, former Lib Dem MP for Redcar, said the firm’s decoration policy reminded him of Nazi Germany.
Presumably, tomorrow’s paper will divulge the devastating finding that the Duke of Devonshire paints all the doors at Edensor, the village on the Chatsworth Estate, a rather fetching shade of dark blue. Or on Friday the explosive revelation that Jesus College, Cambridge, paints the doors of its student houses green.
There is a very good, and mundane, reason why all these landlords like to use one colour of paint for all their properties: it saves a lot of money. It means that you only need to keep one shade of paint in your maintenance shed, and that when the time comes to repaint the whole lot your painter can move from one property to another without having to wash his brushes every time.
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