Taxpayers landed with £250,000 bill for MPs’ portraits

The “net is being cast increasingly wide” when it comes to identifying subjects for the honour of being captured for posterity in the oils or bronzes that then grace the parliamentary estate, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

Records released under the Freedom of Information Act show the bill for a painting of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith came in at £10,000, £8,000 for Minister Without Portfolio Kenneth Clarke and £4,000 for Foreign Secretary William Hague, according to the London Evening Standard.

Labour’s Diane Abbott cost £11,750 to capture, the same amount as was spent on a full-sized statue of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. A painting of long-serving backbencher Dennis Skinner cost £2,180 while Labour’s Tony Benn and former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown both cost £2,000 and another of the party’s former leaders, Sir Menzies Campbell, cost £10,346.

A portrait of Commons Speaker John Bercow cost £22,000 to commission, with an extra £15,000 spent on a frame and coat of arms in keeping with other paintings in the Speaker’s House.

Decisions on commissioning and buying art are made by the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, a cross-party group that is currently chaired by Labour’s Frank Doran.

Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, told the newspaper: “While the public might expect former prime
ministers or speakers to be afforded the honour of a painting or bust in Parliament, it would certainly seem that the net is
being cast increasingly wide
when it comes to identifying subjects.

“Regularly splashing out four or five-figure sums for these
portraits has the whiff of an expensive vanity project, for which unwitting taxpayers are footing the bill.