Nobody cares. That’s the word that supporters have been putting around on social media. Nobody cares about Boris Johnson’s wallpaper. That’s the story that Tory MPs have been purveying to a compliant press and to anyone who will listen. “I’ve stood on doorsteps campaigning,” unnamed door-knockers have reported, “and no one is interested in Carrie Symond’s taste in furniture.” I’ve been following politics for more than forty years and I’ve realised that when politicians tell you that “no one is interested” in a story, that “no one cares”, it’s the equivalent to a shifty used car salesman telling you that the gearstick is supposed to come away from its housing and not to worry about it.

Why should we care, though? It’s not as if taxpayers’ money has been spent on Johnson’s new soft furnishings, is it? It’s not as if he hasn’t stumped up the cash for his haberdashery and settled the bill for his sofa. Are we really concerned about this confected cash for curtains ‘scandal’?

If we’re not, we should be.

The thing is, this is nothing to do with curtains or cushions or carpets. It’s nothing to do with wallpaper, however much it may cost per roll or however hideous it may be. It’s nothing to do with the apparently palatial pretensions the Prime Minister has for his dwelling. This is, where, I think, dead cats are being dropped with abandon by Johnson’s pals. From anonymous reports that Carrie Symonds despises furniture from John Lewis as “cheap tat” to Sarah Vine vacuously insisting that the Prime Minister of the UK “shouldn’t have to live in a skip” we are being spun the story that the only sin being committed here is one of snobbery - of looking down on those for whom owning John Lewis furniture is aspirational and on those who can only dream of dwelling in accommodation as ‘skip-like’ as 11 Downing Street.

So, much sport has been made about “Carrie Antoinette” squeezing Boris’s..er, buses.. until she got a bathroom to shame the Dolmabahçe Palace. The ‘scandal’ has acquired sobriquets such as ‘Cash for Cushions’ and, perhaps inevitably, ‘Wallpapergate’. Yet something more more amiss than the gaudy pretentiousness of the powerful is the issue here. This is not a matter of wallpaper but of probity. It’s not a matter of cushions but of corruption; of the capacity of cash to buy influence and to further enrich the rich at the taxpayers’ expense - at the expense of folk who buy their furnishings on costly credit but who pay their contribution to the nation’s coffers.

It is telling that the one question that really needs to be answered in this matter, the question that Keir Starmer put to Boris Johnson in the Commons last week, has yet to be answered. Instead Johnson responded with a barely coherent, red-faced rant of apparent fury that came across as a child’s tantrum but which - surely inadvertently - failed to answer the question.

Who signed the cheque that paid for Johnson’s flat fittings?

Why is that so hard to answer? Sure, Johnson says that he covered the cost but that doesn’t answer the question. Was there a loan involved? If so, from whom? Does it matter? Yes. It damn well does. There are reasons - good reasons - why senior politicians who have control over the nation’s purse-strings are supposed to declare loans they take from ‘friends’ or gifts from willing donors to political funds or to, well, wallpapering costs. Let’s suppose Johnson has a friend. Let’s call him Lord Tanhigh. Let’s suppose that Lord Tanhigh has interests in companies that have had, or may yet have, lucrative government contracts. Let’s suppose that Johnson, feeling a little pinched for cash on his “chicken feed” salary, slaps Lord Tanhigh on the shoulder somewhere in some quiet spot in Parliament Square and says, “Look, old boy, I’m looking to do out my digs and I’m a little strapped for cash at the moment. Any chance you could help. I’d be very grateful.”

Yes, I know things aren’t as blatant as that. I know that the interplay between wealth and power can be like the courtship dances of exotic birds, but it all comes down to mutual backscratching. If we want our politicians to be honest, or at least try to be, then there has to be openness; we have to know where they get their money from and what their web of obligations entails. We have to know what they owe to whom. Frankly I don’t care if a mate of Boris bailed him out when his decorating bill came in. I do care if Boris doesn’t declare that so I don’t know whether he’s been bought. 

I do care if our Prime Minister owes a debt to some unnamed friend because I care what he will deliver when the debt becomes due