What are the most ‘unsettling’ artworks to hang in 10 Downing Street?

The art of politics

Keir Starmer moved a portrait of Lady Thatcher from one room at 10 Downing Street to another because he found it ‘unsettling’. Some more possibly unsettling artworks that have hung at No. 10:

— ‘More Passion’, by Tracey Emin, featuring the words ‘More Passion’ in neon, was installed by David Cameron in 2011. In 2022 Emin wrote on Instagram about her unhappiness that it was still there after the revelation of Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties. His ‘behaviour and lack of contrition’, she said, were ‘bizarre’.

— Annabel’s – a series of lino cuts depicting Sloanes revelling at the Mayfair nightclub in the hedonistic mid-1980s – also hung in Downing Street during Johnson’s premiership. The artist was Nicholas Garland, whom Johnson appointed the Cartoonist of the 2012 Olympics when he was Mayor of London.

— ‘La Rêve de l’Artiste’, by Jean-Antoine Watteau, an 18th-century painting of the artist collapsed at his easel dreaming of naked cherubs, was bought by the first prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, and hung in his wife’s Downing Street dressing room.