PM’S new briefing room leaves me blue over languishing lockdown projects

Idon’t know about you but now that the end of the lockdown world is nigh and the words “optimistic” and “Nicola Sturgeon” – hitherto never heard in the same sentence or daily Covid briefing – are being bandied about willy-nilly, I find myself running out of time to do all the things I intended to do when I did actually have the time to do them and no real excuse not to, but ended up not doing them anyway. Just because I could. Or not.

So many projects, so little time to be bothered and, to my eternal shame, I have been brought up short and face-to-face with my own shortcomings by no less an institution than the British Government. On both public and private levels, too. You may recall, only a week or two ago, my amazement at the thought, hard graft and sheer spending power put into the redecoration of the apartment of our own dear PM and his latest family.

Well, there’s more. I don’t know how they found the time, what with that Brexit to get done, Covid to conquer and paying more attention to damage done to inanimate objects than to the dangers facing just over half of the British population. Yet somehow, amidst all this unrelenting hive of activity aimed at the public good (and purse), they have managed to plan, organise and execute (aptly, if you’ve seen the results) the refurbishment of the Downing Street briefing room. At last, a project where the great British public can actually see, every day if it has masochistic tendencies, exactly how its cash was splashed.

The previous one (and it shows you how much attention I paid because I didn’t notice – there’s money well spent) was apparently vaguely reminiscent of Princess Anne’s living room or your mum’s Dralonupholstered “lounge” of the 1970s. This new incarnation is supposed to be based on the White House briefing room (including, one might surmise, the techy stuff which was apparently installed – or Putin? – by a Russian company) but with more flags. That’s the patriotic stuff to give the troops. Who do these people think they are? Keir Starmer?

I reckon somebody on the design team has been watching too much of that great TV show The Big Bang Theory, where chief nerd and would-be Nobel Prize-winner Dr Sheldon Cooper presents a Youtube show called Fun with Flags, a contradiction in terms if ever I heard one. America, in spite of having 50 states, has just the one in its national communication centre. We now have four, all Union Jacks, standing, it is said, for the four nations of the United Kingdom. Ah, well. Good luck with that then, especially if there isn’t anyone on the premises who knows which way up they should be hung, to avoid being trolled by irate vexillologists.

See? Nothing is ever wasted. I had to look all this up and I have discovered that the study of flags is called vexillology. Now don’t you feel better for knowing that? They don’t talk about flagging interest for nothing, you know.

Any road up, this room, apart from resembling a cross between the venue for an unacceptable type of political rally and a low-grade hotel conference centre, is blue. It is very, very blue. Perhaps they got a job lot of specially mixed Thatcher Azure, rejected by Carrie Symonds for the Prime Ministerial lav at No 10 and felt they had to use it up somehow to prove they really, really wanted to balance the Chancer of the Exchequer’s creaking account books. Either that or someone’s got a pal who owns a paint company.

I just hope there’s enough left over to slap a few coats on a carefully-connected, if less grandly-designed ante-room where they can kettle all the news reporters from the publications and TV shows they don’t want to have cluttering up the place when the unfortunate minister of the day is fielding all those awkward questions Boris Johnson doesn’t want to answer, like: “How do you sleep at night?”.

Although from now on, since so many of them have done such a sterling job, I understand that the figure at the centre of presentations from the Room of Doom is going to be the PM’S new press secretary. What a good thing that the blue screen technology of yesteryear is no more, where images were flashed up on to – yes, you guessed it – a blue screen in order to make telling visual points, and newscasters of the day were told not to wear blue ties or tops in case said images plastered themselves all over their chests at the same time.

I hope Mr Johnson’s new communications wallah doesn’t have a wardrobe full of blue suits or we’ll all be sitting there like the cast of Gogglebox, doing a Where’s Wally, trying to pick her out from the background. But I suspect it might be quite easy. If previous experience is anything to go by, she’ll be the one with the red face.

The centre figure is going to be the PM’S new press secretary

REVAMP: Downing Street’s briefing room has been refurbished and its new look is very, very blue.