The wallpaper famously used by Boris Johnson to decorate the Downing Street flat has begun to peel off the walls, Jeremy Hunt has revealed.
The Chancellor told how Liz Truss painted over the £840-a-roll gold paper in her short time as prime minister.
Mr Hunt said he and his wife had been keen to inspect the decor when he arrived in the apartment above No11.
“We are moving in, as it happens this weekend,” he said at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards.
“I had one or two other things on until then.
“We did go in though, just to have a look around the flat first and, of course, where did we want to go first? We wanted to go and see the wallpaper.
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Alamy Stock Photo)
“The massive disappointment was to discover that that wallpaper – this may be a world exclusive – had started to peel off of its own accord and had actually been painted over by Liz Truss.
“So I will be saying to my children, ‘scratch over there, there’s gold in the walls’.”
Upmarket interior designer Lulu Lytle oversaw the redecoration, which cost at least £112,000 – well in excess of the £30,000 annual public grant a prime minister receives for their living quarters.
She was brought in to get rid of what was described as the “John Lewis nightmare” left behind by Theresa May in 2019.
Soon after moving in, Mr Johnson came under fire for trying to get Tory donor Lord Brownlow to fund the lavish revamp.
The media storm eventually ended with Mr Johnson paying the bill himself.
But the Conservative Party was later fined £17,800 by the Electoral Commission for breaching electoral law over the way the money was recorded.
And Mr Johnson got into a row with his ethics advisor, Lord Geidt, after key texts – which showed the PM asking for more cash in return for raising Lord Brownlow’s idea of a Great Exhibition 2.0 – were withheld.
Rishi Sunak is the first prime minister in 25 years to live in the flat above No10.
Every other prime minister from Sir Tony Blair onwards has preferred the larger flat next door.
But Mr Sunak has chosen to return to the apartment he lived in whilst chancellor with his wife, Akshata Murty, and their two daughters.
Asked why they had chosen the smaller of the two flats available to them, Mr Sunak’s press secretary last month said: “They were very happy there.”
Mr Sunak redecorated the No10 flat in 2020, paying “upfront and entirely at his own expense”, according to a government statement last year.