In depth: The gilded makeover of the No 11 flat and Boris Johnson’s battle to pay for it

Nothing flatters Boris Johnson quite so much as comparisons to his great hero Winston Churchill, and in one respect the two are undeniably alike: their troublesome struggles with their own finances.

Churchill constantly had to turn to wealthy friends for help when he overstretched himself, whether it was to cover debts on his country home, Chartwell, vast invoices from his shirt makers, or the astronomical costs of his champagne and cigar intake. In the pre-war years, he was repeatedly attacked by opposition MPs over the gifts and loans he needed to stay afloat.

Mr Johnson inadvertently emulated his wartime predecessor when he and his pregnant girlfriend (now fiancée) Carrie Symonds decided to embark on a lavish redecoration of the grace and favour flat they share above No 11 Downing Street.

In January 2020, when Brexit was yet to happen and Covid was an obscure disease causing problems in China, the couple were basking in the success of Mr Johnson’s general election win the previous month.

The couple could look forward to five more years in Downing Street, or perhaps even longer, and were about to start a family. However, Miss Symonds, it is claimed, was unhappy with the "John Lewis nightmare" decor of the flat, left behind by Theresa May.

Expensive tastes

The couple were not alone in wanting to put their own stamp on what could only ever be a temporary home: Cherie Blair reportedly carried out a £127,000 modernisation of the flat, then David and Samantha Cameron spent £64,000 having the kitchen and bathroom ripped out and replaced.

Prime Ministers are given a taxpayer-funded allowance of up to £30,000 per year to cover refurbishments of the flat, which might seem generous to the average homeowner, but it was nowhere near enough for Mr Johnson and Miss Symonds’ expensive tastes.

Miss Symonds commissioned top-end interior designers Soane Britain, run by darling of the fashionable set Lulu Lytle, to give the place a revamp.

Ms Lytle’s creations are not for the financially faint-hearted: her Bear Sofa costs £19,950, an Owl lampshade costs £11,600, a Venus chair is £5,900 and Dianthus wallpaper costs £840 per roll.

Mr Johnson reportedly told aides the redecoration was costing "tens and tens of thousands – I can’t afford it!"

According to the Daily Mail, he also moaned: "The cost is totally out of control – she’s buying gold wallpaper!"

His comment may have been intended both literally and metaphorically, as Soane Britain does sell wallpaper in Yellow Gold and Old Gold hues.

The total cost ran to £88,000, leaving Mr Johnson personally liable for £58,000 once the £30,000 allowance had been swallowed up.

For a man who earns £150,000 a year and previously earned more than £350,000 a year from journalism and speaking engagements, such a sum might appear entirely manageable.

But he had just been through a costly divorce from his ex-wife Marina, in which the family home in London was sold and Mr Johnson kept his former constituency home in Oxfordshire, which the couple originally bought in 2003. In July 2019 he and Miss Symonds had also bought a home together in Camberwell, south London, at a cost of £1.2 million, for which they needed a mortgage.

Mr Johnson also took out a mortgage on the Oxfordshire property, and put it on the rental market for £4,250 per month.

Money woes

The Prime Minister had been complaining about money for some time, and as the costs of the Downing Street refurbishment mounted, he made it clear he needed help paying the bills.

Perhaps inspired by Churchill, Mr Johnson reportedly turned to allies with deep pockets, starting with JCB boss Lord Bamford, whose donations to the Tory party have topped £10 million.

That plan did not come to fruition and as early as February last year Mr Johnson is understood to have suggested the idea of a blind trust, which could receive anonymous donations, to preserve the whole Downing Street complex as a public building. A similar scheme is used in the White House to pay for the upkeep of the US President’s office.

He enlisted the help of Tory Party chairman Ben Elliot to sort out the mess over his finances, and Mr Elliot reportedly told him he should take out a personal loan to cover the cost.

Mr Johnson abandoned the blind trust idea, which had been deemed a non-starter by the Cabinet Office, and a different type of trust was proposed with another Tory donor, Lord Brownlow, agreeing to head it.

Lord Brownlow, who made his millions from a business consultancy, was vice-chairman of the Tory party until July last year.

Lord Darling, the former Labour chancellor, was asked to sit on the trust to ensure it had cross-party support, but declined because he was worried it would attract donors who would want something in return.

As we now know from his blog, the Prime Minister’s then chief adviser Dominic Cummings was deeply unsettled by the affair and told Mr Johnson that the proposals for funding the refurbishment were "unethical, foolish and possibly illegal".

Friends of Mr Elliot have said he "tried to stop the madness repeatedly", and Dan Rosenfield, who became Mr Johnson’s new chief of staff in January this year, is also understood to have been shocked at what was going on.

Who covered the bill?

By June, with the decorating bill overdue for payment, the Cabinet Office appears to have covered the entire £88,000 cost of the refurbishment on the understanding that £58,000 would be repaid by Mr Johnson.

While Mr Johnson and his aides tried to agree a way of obtaining the money, Conservative central office paid the outstanding £58,000 to the Cabinet Office, though this too was a problem: under Electoral Commission rules, party funds can only be used for political campaigning.

According to the Daily Mail, a leaked email shows that on Oct 23, as the second wave of coronavirus was escalating, Lord Brownlow told Mr Elliot he had made a £58,000 "donation" to Tory HQ to cover the sum paid by the party to the Cabinet Office, and that it should be attributed to the "soon to be formed Downing Street Trust" which he was to head. Exactly when he made the donation remains unknown.

To date, the trust has still not been formed, and after Cabinet Secretary Simon Case told MPs this week that it could not be used to pay for refurbishments to the flat anyway, it seems likely the trust idea will die a death.

A man who answered the intercom at Lord Brownlow’s country home near Reading would only say "no comment" when asked about the £58,000 donation.

Earlier this week Number 10 released a statement saying that all of the refurbishment costs "have been met by the Prime Minister personally", but that does not answer the question of where he got the money from, nor who he paid it to.

Clash in the Commons

Number 10’s various statements have not ruled out the possibility that the redecorating bills were initially paid by someone else, a point which was hammered home by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Sir Keir gave the Prime Minister a multiple choice question, saying: "This is the initial invoice - either the taxpayer paid the initial invoice, or it was the Conservative Party, or it was a private donor, or it was the Prime Minister.

"I am making it easy for the Prime Minister - it is now multiple choice. There are only four options. It should be easier than finding the ‘chatty rat’.

"I ask him again: who paid the initial invoice - the initial invoice, Prime Minister - for the redecoration of the Prime Minister’s flat?"

Mr Johnson would only repeat that "I have covered the costs", though he said revealingly that "any further declaration that I have to make" will come after consultation with his new standards adviser, Lord Geidt (who previously worked as the Queen’s private secretary).

Sir Keir suggested that Mr Johnson "during the pandemic was nipping out of meetings to choose wallpaper at £840 a roll" and mocked him for asking the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, to investigate who paid for the refurbishment of the flat.

"Why doesn’t the Prime Minister just tell him?" he asked. "That would be the end of the investigation."

His personal attacks on Mr Johnson succeeded in at least one respect - they clearly riled the Prime Minister, who made no attempt to disguise his anger at the Labour leader’s onslaught.

Investigation launched

The Electoral Commission has launched an investigation into the affair, saying there were "reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence or offences may have occurred".

Under the watchdog’s rules, all loans of more than £7,500 must be declared. To date, no loan from Lord Brownlow has appeared in the Electoral Commission’s register (though it does contain details of donations totalling £2,256,174 made by him to the party, the most recent being a sum of £1,250 in November).

Mr Johnson has, to date, made no mention of any gifts or loans relating to the flat in the Register of MPs’ Interests, where benefits and loans are supposed to be registered within 28 days.

Meanwhile John Lewis, whose "nightmare" furnishings allegedly set the ball rolling on "wallpapergate", took the slight in its stride. On the department store’s official Twitter account, it told customers: "Time for an interiors refresh? We pride our Home Design Service on having something for *almost* everyone." A further tweet followed.

By 1945, Churchill's shambolic finances were a footnote in the story of his premiership as he was remembered by a grateful nation for saving his country from a foreign foe. Mr Johnson, who insisted that the public is more interested in his handling of the pandemic than his wallpaper, will be hoping history treats him just as kindly.

Changing rooms: From dry rot in the 1950s to May’s John Lewis lamps

Winston Churchill

In 1954, renovation work on Downing Street was a pressing matter. A survey during Winston Churchill’s second spell in office discovered that Nos 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street were at risk of partially collapsing due to dry rot and beetle damage. But Churchill was dismayed at the timeframe. “I am shocked that the Ministry of Works contemplates two or three years. The Ark did not take so long,” he wrote in a document released by the National Archives.

Margaret Thatcher

Celebrated for her humble beginnings as a grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher kept a close eye on costs. Government papers from 1979, made public in 2011, showed that Mrs Thatcher had insisted any furnishing spending was as "economical as possible". She was said to have paid for her own ironing board and expressed disbelief at a document detailing costs that indicated £464 had been spent on replacing linen.

Tony Blair

In a break from tradition, Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, moved to the bigger flat at No 11. There followed an extensive refurbishment, which included the arrival of a bed reported to have cost £3,500 and wallpaper that was priced at £70 a roll. It has been reported that the total spent by the Blairs during the prime minister’s 10 years in office was £285,380, with a highest annual spend of £48,336.

Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown was less extravagant in his refurbishment costs than his predecessor, spending £84,622 during his three years in Downing Street. He and his wife, Sarah, were said to have kept the kitchen installed by the Blairs and they never exceeded their annual allowance, spending a maximum of £29,389 in 2009-10 before his resignation.

David Cameron

David Cameron also found his spending on refurbishments at the centre of a row. He faced criticism for spending the entire £30,000 budget available to him on extensively renovating the No 11 flat in 2011. The centrepiece of the redesign was the flat’s kitchen, which got new black granite worktops and a cooker that cost £3,400. Figures later showed that Mr Cameron had spent £92,900 on his family’s living quarters.

Theresa May

One of the more modest spenders in recent decades, Theresa May used less than one year’s allowance on refurbishment during her three years in office. Mrs May spent a reported £25,534 on refurbishing the living quarters, the highest yearly spend of which was £19,400 in 2016-17, but she spent nothing in her second year. A photo shoot during her time in office showed touches that included a £100 table lamp from John Lewis.