# 65
Of all the front doors to all the houses on all the streets of all the cities in all the world… the front door to Number 10 Downing Street must be the most photographed and consequently the most universally recognised. It says a lot about the unsteady evolution of the British version of parliamentary democracy that the Prime Minister’s official residence is a house built in the late 17th Century by a cunning speculator on shallow foundations and using the very cheapest materials available. By history and custom, our PM dwells behind a relatively ordinary looking six-panel front door, separated from the London street by a screen of iron-railings, a couple of stone steps and a row of boot-scrapers. The surrounding door case has muted classical references very much in the Georgian style: a pair of decorative brackets atop moulded pilasters supporting a crosshead pediment.
10 Downing Street, London SW1
A semi-circular fanlight in cast-iron and clear glass occupies the space above the door. Its radial spokes anticipated the Great British Sunrise motif which was to remain popular in leaded lights and garden gates until circa 1957, by which time the sun was very evidently setting on the British Empire . To remind any passing plebeian that this is the house of “Her Majesty’s Government”, the corner railings have been extended upwards to form a double-curved arch supporting an old gas lamp under a gilded crown. We like to think of ourselves as citizens but as long as there’s a Crown above that lamp we cannot be other than its subjects.
Built by Sir George Downing in the 1680s, the original two-storey townhouse and adjoining properties were offered to Sir Robert Walpole by George II in 1733 as a gift in return for his services to the nation. Unusually, by the standards of the time, Walpole did not keep the houses for himself but proposed that Downing Street become the office and living quarters for whoever was the incumbent First Lord of the Treasury. And so it has continued down the years, with the street outside remaining accessible to the public until the 1980s and only closed-off completely behind security gates after an IRA mortar attack in February 1991.
The detailing on the door is simple and would be unobtrusive were it not for the highly polished finish inflicted upon it since the 1980s. The outer face is completely flush except where the six solid panels are separated from the adjoining rails and stiles by inset half-round beads. The effect is to enhance both the apparent solidity of the door and its elegance by dividing the surface into six classically proportioned rectangles. Sometime around 1787 the house was re-numbered from ‘5’ to ‘10’. Today, the zero of the ‘10’ is deliberately not straight, allegedly in some strange conservation-mad deference to the wonky fixing of the original, more than two hundred years ago. A brass letter-plate sits awkwardly across the second muntin; I say ‘awkwardly’ because – were it real - in that position its slot would cut clean through the central upright and thereby weaken the whole door. This no longer matters because the original oak door was replaced in the 1980s by a blast-proof facsimile made from steel. The letter box is entirely false anyway; it does not connect through into the interior. We worry about our politicians being “out of touch” and sure enough the PM’s letter box is entirely phoney and his front door can only be opened from the inside – there’s an unused knocker but no keyhole or lever handle on the outside.
Like most elements of the British constitution, Number 10 Downing Street displays a deceptive façade, suggesting comfortable domesticity and obscuring almost everything else. Precious little remains of the original 17th Century building; the terrace having been almost entirely re-built in various stages between 1960 and 1990. What appears to be a pair of modest dwelling houses is actually part of an office block containing about 200 rooms with living accommodation only on the third floor. It’s not ‘The Prime Minister’s House’ any more than the Queen’s Speech is a speech written by the Queen or the PM ever actually answers the questions fired across the Commons during ‘Questions to the Prime Minister’. The Blairs and the Camerons didn’t/don’t live at number 10 but in the flat above number 11. Harold Wilson didn’t live there at all during his second ministry (1974-76) but, for the sake of appearances, he always pretended to.
There are many symbolic and sometimes disturbing parallels between Downing Street and the even stranger edifice that is the British Constitution. Unsurprisingly, both were initially opposed by aristocratic landowners. Both have been knocked about and altered – sometimes carelessly - by transitory politicians. In the history of both, lengthy periods of neglect have tended to alternate with sudden, drastic, renovations. Neither of them has adapted easily to the modern world. Both remain prone to leaks, sudden technical failures, occasional subsidence and intermittent outbreaks of dry-rot. William Pitt the Younger lived in Downing Street from 1783-1801, longer than any other Prime Minister, and called it “My vast, awkward house.” Under his immediate predecessor, Lord North, the American colonies had found the British Constitution so bloody ‘awkward’ that they rebelled and fought a War of Independence (1775-1783) to be allowed to write their own new constitution (and build a more suitable dwelling for their new political leader.) They clearly intended to put right all the things they saw to be wrong with the pair of calamities the British had built.
In the newly liberated American colonies, the Framers [Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Madison , Washington New World . Just in case they’d missed anything, within one year of signing the Constitution, they added a Bill of Rights in the form of Amendments 1 to 10, first ratified 1791. Nevertheless, they still contrived to ignore completely the existence of slavery within their territory. They set their hands to building a patriarchal system of government, believing their work to be based upon clarity, logic and sweet reason. From 1800, they housed their elected president in an harmonious building whose architecture intentionally copied the “frozen music” of Periclean Athens. The British Army rather unsportingly set fire to the White House in 1814, but it was quickly restored and President Monroe was in residence before the end of 1817.
North Portico - The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.
If you followed the US Presidential Election of November 2012 and listened to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address to Congress, you will be aware of how difficult it might be to restore what he called “the basic bargain that built this country.” The checks and balances carefully prescribed in the text of the Constitution cannot be circumvented. There is no mechanism to prevent deadlock if, as now, a Democratic President is ideologically at odds with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. There is considerable wheeling and dealing to be done if the Federal Government is to make any progress on many pressing issues: debt and deficit reduction, infrastructure repairs, gun-control, the minimum wage and facing the consequences of climate change. The architecture of the Constitution channels the discourse of American political life. Obama’s chosen rhetoric not only contained the traditional challenge for the Congress to put ‘nation before party’, it also included an emotive definition of ‘United States
In Britain Downing Street stairs and found salvation in the form of ‘A ROYAL CHARTER’. Our Prime Minister has concluded that what this country needs to correct the systemic misdemeanours exposed by the phone-hacking scandal is a high-quality exposition of the calligrapher’s art, written on vellum.
“I say you chaps, just look here; I think I’ve found the very thing! Blow the cobwebs orff that will you, my good man. Splendid; we’ll have ourselves a Right Royal Press Complaints Commission - that’ll do nicely.”
A Royal Charter - "...that'll do nicely."
If Cameron gets his way, we’ll have a brand-new toothless and ineffectual Commission established by Royal Charter, independent of parliament and therefore accountable only to Her Majesty’s Privy Council. The - err - Privy Council? – I hear you ask - What the hell’s that, when it’s at home? – Well let me see… turns out it has about six hundred members, all of them top politicians, bishops of the Church of England or senior judges. Its members therefore include the very people who turned a blind eye to press misbehaviour in the past because they were in thrall to all those editors and proprietors… It seems that the ‘top gun’ on The Privy Council, after Her Majesty of course, is actually you, David Cameron. And your Coalition Cabinet is the primary executive committee of the Privy Council. Brilliant! The newly Royal PCC will be underpinned by Rebekah Brooks’ horse-riding chum and his whole jolly Cabinet…What could possibly go wrong?
“Fantastic,” answers Dave, “That’s as safe as houses! Let’s see if those ‘Hacked Off’ campaigners can pick the dry rot out of that one!”
Knock, knock!
