In a summer punctuated by an election and then riots there has not really been a “silly season”, the traditional news-light period when holidaying MPs become worked up about trivialities. That is until now – thanks to a row about a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. What is known is that the slightly austere painting of the former prime minister by the artist Richard Stone has been moved from the Downing Street study where it had hung since 2009, when Gordon Brown commissioned it. This one fact was enough to prompt front page stories in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, as well as apocalyptic responses from the likes of the former Tory minister John Redwood, who said it showed Keir Starmer “wants to drag Britain down”.
Meanwhile, Priti Patel, asked about Starmer’s decision at her Conservative leadership campaign launch, said: “I think it tells us everything really about his priorities. His priorities are not on serving the country, his priorities are literally just about tinkering at the margins.” Somewhat more cryptically, the official Conservative X account posted a story about the painting with the words: “Tell me you’ve got a problem with women without telling me you’ve got a problem with women.” What is going on? It does seem Starmer was responsible for the decision to remove the portrait. According to Tom Baldwin, the prime minister’s biographer, when they met in the room recently, Starmer agreed that the large, gilt-framed picture was “unsettling” and he was likely to take it down. “And he has,” Baldwin told a literary event in Glasgow, comments initially reported by the Herald newspaper. A No 10 source said the portrait was “not on the wall any longer” but declined to say where it had gone. Jacqui Smith, the Labour former cabinet minister, newly made a peer and a skills minister in the education department, told LBC it would remain in No 10, but again gave no details. In one sense, such decorative reshuffling is entirely routine. New ministers are given access to the near 15,000-strong government art collection to decorate their offices, and a change of government almost always brings a change in what is hanging on the walls. The Stone portrait is slightly different in that it was not acquired by the government art collection, rather, the £100,000 cost was paid for by an anonymous donor. The picture shows Thatcher at the height of her power in 1982, just after the Falklands war. The location also has significance – Thatcher used the room as her study, and it is now known as the Thatcher room. Stone, speaking in 2009 as he completed the work, said he understood the portrait would “remain in Downing Street for ever”. And so it may – just, and even if only for now, in a less prominent and perhaps less unsettling position.