Well, hard times there may be, but at least one person doesn’t have to stint themselves when it comes to getting things done about the house.It has come to light that, in the year since David Cameron moved into Downing Street, more that £680,000 has been spent on it by the pm, including £30,000 on his private apartments (above).
Now I didn’t know it, but it seem that an annual allowance of £30,000 is available to prime ministers for the upkeep of their personal accommodation at Downing Street, and that Mr Cameron has spent the lot. I wonder what he’ll use it for this year.
Last year’s lot was spent on plumbing, rewiring and redecorating the place. Apparently the furnishings (loadsa money, but precious little taste in my humble opinion) were paid for by the Camerons.
Another £653,192.34 was spent on external and internal renovation work to the offices and reception rooms in Downing Street. This included cabling, plumbing and energy efficiency improvements. (Jeez, I wish we could have some of that.)
Downing Street would not comment on exactly what the money was spent on and refused Freedom of Information requests asking what changes have been made to the Grade I listed building which the state owns and so is a council house by any other name.
No one would expect the prime minister, or our own first minister for that matter, to live in a slum, although god knows we expect a fair number of “ordinary people” to do so, but you’d have expected a little better in a year when austerity has been the name of the game and Cameron even made a big show of travelling to Spain on holiday with the most awful budget airline, and cancelled his Christmas holidays in Thailand, just to show us “ordinary people” that even “important people” were having to slum it...(well, except Osborne who doesn’t care for that sort of nonsense and trotted off to Klosters).
You see, I can hardly believe that the Browns, weird though they are, would have lived in a slum with water streaming down the walls and dodgy plumbing that required £30,000 spending on it to make it habitable.
It all reminds me of when the Queen Mother died and Charles got her old house. He was given £5 million of state (our) money to do it up. Now I grant you it is a big, no massive, house, but £5 million worth of repairs suggests that it’s hardly any wonder the poor old dear died, as there wasn’t a bloody roof on the place. OK, the decoration might not have been to Mrs Parker Bowles taste, but it was hardly a ruin with the paper hanging off the walls.
And so with Downing Street. They can’t be there THAT much. They have their constituency home and a country estate provided by us. Surely they could have tolerated the Browns’ decoration a bit longer given that some of the rest of us can’t afford to eat.
Why do these people think that they are worth things that we are not? Why do they think that we should pay for them? And why do they refuse us the details about them?
Between the foreign aid budget increases that this man has agreed to and his own insatiable desire to spend our money on himself, no wonder Osborne’s books get in a worse state by the day.
Nauseating picture of the "little women in the kitchen, wearing pretty dresses and talking about recipes while the men get down to talking about important things that they wouldn't understand". (Particularly idiotic in this situation as Michelle Obama could out-think David Cameron before she opened her eyes in the morning.)
