Charity to fund Carrie’s costly refurb is ‘monstrous’
SETTING up a charity to pay for Carrie Symonds’ makeover of the flat she shares with Boris Johnson would be ‘monstrous and bizarre’, the former head of a standards watchdog warned.
Reports claim the prime minister hopes to tap wealthy Tory donors after his fiancée spent about £100,000 on refurbishment at Downing Street.
But Sir Alistair Graham, a former head of the committee on standards in public life, said: ‘It would be an outrage if it was allowed. I suspect it’ll be illegal, and it’s certainly an unjustifiable use of public funds.’
The PM is already allowed £30,000 per year in public money for works to his private quarters. But he needs more cash after Ms Symonds let her spending get ‘totally out of control’ and ordered gold wall coverings, it is claimed. The creation of a trust, similar to one used by the White House for antiques and art, would allow backers to donate tax-free.
Ms Symonds, 32, is said to have complained of inheriting a ‘John Lewis furniture nightmare’ from ex-PM Theresa May. She hired top designers Soane Britain for a year-long refit.
No.10 referred journalists to the Cabinet Office annual report and accounts, which are not yet available.
vaccinated. If I’m asked, I’ll just go where my privacy is respected – and as I’d spend at least £100, it would be their loss. Brian, Liverpool
■ I am disturbed by some of the increasingly nonsensical tirades against human rights appearing in your letters pages, as typified by M Corcoran (MetroTalk, Tue).
Corcoran is good enough to remind the anti-authoritarian, pro-freedom lobby that we don’t know what human rights are but he or she declines to offer us any insight into them. ‘Read a book,’ as the kids on Twitter say – just not one by Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill or George Orwell.
There may be no specific right ‘to go to the pub’, as Corocoran says, but the right to liberty is perhaps the most fundamental human right. This necessarily covers freedom of movement and association within the public realm. If a business owner chooses to open his business to the public, every member of the public has the right to go there, so we do, in fact, have the right to go to the pub.
I’m sure the authoritarians will mumble something about the ‘right to life’. Unfortunately, this argument fails to take into consideration the fact that we are all sentenced to death eventually by the laws of nature. It is right that human law should protect life but not to the point where it attempts to override natural law. Death by disease is a natural way to die and nature does not answer to human law.
Anyone who thinks they can protect life simply by destroying liberty will be sorely disappointed – and they’ll create a good deal of misery and suffering in the process.