When Boris goes – which surely must be soon – will he take the gold wallpaper with him? Among all the other scandals which have accompanied the refurbishing of his Downing Street flat – who paid for it? Did he declare it as a gift? Is it true that the paper wouldn’t stay up because it was too heavy? Whose awful taste was responsible for it? – it has always puzzled me that he should feel the need to redecorate, and so expensively, an apartment which would only be his while he was prime minister. Did he imagine that he would be there for ever? As ‘King of the World’ – his early ambition – perhaps? Once – that is – his minions have so destroyed the (unwritten) British constitution as to allow him to override any legal and parliamentary checks and balances to his absolute authority. (They’ve started on that already.)

Question number 2. What part has Mother-of-the-Nation Carrie taken in all this? I recognise that she is – or was before she married him – a serious political operator. But in the good old days home furnishings were always seen as part of ‘the woman’s sphere’: making the nest comfortable for hubby when he came home from his hard day’s work. So is he ‘under her thumb’? Does she ‘hen-peck’ him? (That might not go down too well with his ‘Red Wall’ voters.) Or can we see the serious political operator poking out here from beneath her skirts? – That is, with a more cunning plot than he could ever realise: to undermine his premiership by adding to the scorn and scandal that at present seems to be engulfing it, either in her interest – to force him to take more time with the babies (unlikely, that) – or in secret league with old dissident Tory friends of hers?

In any event it can hardly be worth her having to sleep with him.