Keir Starmer has said that he ordered a portrait of Margaret Thatcher to be moved out of his Downing Street study not out of dislike for her, but because he dislikes working with pictures of anyone looking down at him.
In another personal revelation in a BBC interview aired on Sunday morning, Starmer said the Siberian kitten acquired by the family as part of a deal negotiated by his children “for moving into Downing Street” had been called Prince.
News late last month that the Thatcher portrait, commissioned by Gordon Brown in 2009, had been moved from the room she also used as a study, prompted front-page stories in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, as well as anger from Conservative politicians.
Asked about the decision, Starmer said the picture had not always hung in the study, and had first been placed there by Gordon Brown. He said he used the room, known as the Thatcher room, for “quietly reading most afternoons”.
“This is not actually about Margaret Thatcher at all,” he told BBC1’s Sunday Morning with Laura Kuenssberg. “I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down. I found it when I was a lawyer. I used to have sort of pictures of judges. I don’t like it. I like landscapes.
“This is my study, my private place where I go to work, I didn’t want a picture of anyone. As a lawyer, people try to persuade me that I needed pictures of judges staring at me the whole time. I didn’t like it. I don’t like it any more if they’re politicians.”
This rule extended to home decor, with Starmer saying he only had photos of his children and “the cats” – the family already had one cat before moving into No 10 – up on the walls.
“I might tolerate Thierry Henry on the wall, but that’s about as far as I go,” said Starmer, an Arsenal fan, referring to the club’s former striker.
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Asked about the new kitten, Starmer said it followed “a long summer of negotiation”, adding that he was very aware of the impact on his children of having to move into Downing Street. His children, it had emerged previously, were initially keen on a German shepherd dog.
“I have to acknowledge this is a big move for them, and therefore, negotiating a fantastic kitten called Prince was part of the deal that they extracted from me,” he said.