After £2.6m and a seven-month wait, the curtains have finally opened on a studio based inside Downing Street where the prime minister’s press secretary will address the nation in new White House-style TV briefings. The first glimpses of the room revealed by ITV showed the podium that Allegra Stratton, a former BBC and Guardian journalist who also worked as communications director for the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will stand behind as she fields questions from journalists. Those briefings, which will replace the daily off-camera grilling of the prime minister’s spokesman and Stratton herself, still have no start date. But the room itself reveals a few clues about what Boris Johnson aims to achieve with the radical shake-up to his media strategy. First there are flags – four of them – adorning the stage, the only splashes of red and white in a sea of blue: a blue backdrop, a blue screen bearing the Downing Street logo and blue carpet. While it may have been intended as an unsubtle association with the bright blue rosettes and flyers people will be receiving in the run-up to elections, it caused mirth for one Tory aide, who joked: “I can’t believe something with a blue screen got past whatever committee approved it! The internet is going to thank them for years to come.”
Then there are other furnishings seen in the snapshots, including a series of robotic cameras situated at the back of the room – the only sign other than the TV monitor on-stage of the “audio-visual equipment” the Cabinet Office recently used to justify the spending splurge. While other Conservative advisers said the room looked “pretty cool” and “slick”, a red Henry vacuum cleaner parked in an otherwise barren room escaped no one’s notice. A “Press Office Henry Hoover” Twitter account was set up within an hour of the pictures being released. A Tory MP called the whole thing a “waste of cash” and “far too American”, while a civil servant noted the whole thing had the air of “a brochure for a shit civil wedding”. The point about cost was picked up on by a Labour source who claimed taxpayers will “feel the Conservatives have wasted their money yet again” and highlighted the spending coming “at a time when there’s apparently no money for a pay rise for nurses”. A No 10 staffer just expressed relief the room is finally complete so they can have the well-known wood-panelled room where daily coronavirus press conferences are held back to its normal function as a meeting room.