Boris Johnson’s lavish flat makeover included spending £28,000 of taxpayers’ cash mainly on “painting and sanding of floorboards”, an official report has revealed.
The document also exposes an extraordinary money-chain before the prime minister himself finally paid the costs above an annual allowance for works – a sum also thought to be £28,000.
The interior designer Lulu Lytle paid her fees back to the Cabinet Office, which then passed the money back to the Conservative Party, before Mr Johnson repaid her directly.
A former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life called the affair “a scandal”, saying “the Cabinet Office really got the prime minister out of a hole”.
“It is a scandal that shows the prime minister in a very poor light and he is going to have to accept what this has done to his reputation,” Sir Alistair Graham said.
“The prime minister never came absolutely clean about who funded the flat. Why couldn’t he just be straight with the public?”
The Electoral Commission has launched a formal investigation into the financing of the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat, saying “an offence or offences may have occurred”.
Mr Johnson once dismissed it as a “farrago of nonsense” – and his ethics adviser Lord Geidt said he had acted “unwisely”, but concluded he had not breached the ministerial code.
However, that widely-criticised report did not set out the saga of how the makeover was financed, now revealed in the Cabinet Office’s annual report.
It states: “The Cabinet Office has a £30,000 budget each year for the upkeep of the dwellings within No 11 Downing Street.
“During 2020-21, Cabinet Office spent £28,647 with Mitie Facilities Management Ltd at the request of the prime minister, which included painting and sanding of floorboards.”
The accounts add: “Additional invoices for the refurbishment work undertaken on the No 11 Downing Street residence were received and paid for by the Cabinet Office and subsequently recharged to the Conservative Party in July 2020.
“In March 2021, the supplier refunded the Cabinet Office, and the Cabinet Office refunded the Conservative Party, with all final costs of wider refurbishment met by the prime minister personally.”
A No 10 spokesperson said: “Other than works funded through the annual allowance, the costs of the wider refurbishment of the flat have been met by the prime minister personally.”
In March, leaked emails revealed how plans were hatched to set up a charitable trust to pay for the upkeep of the flat and Downing Street, but were then abandoned.
Mr Johnson was reported to have protested that the costs – to rid the flat of what his new wife Carrie Symonds had apparently dubbed a “John Lewis furniture nightmare” –had run out of control.
His former aide, Dominic Cummings, claims he told the prime minister that his plan to have “donors secretly pay for the renovation” were “unethical, foolish [and] possibly illegal”.
