WHILE THEY ARE still mopping up after the War of Cherie’s Hair, a new bloodbath threatens the Government: the Siege of Conran’s Drift. Sir Terence Conran, formerly unafraid to stand up and be counted for the Blair regime, has now stormed into print with an attack on the Prime Minister’s taste, as seen in the furnishings of 10 Downing Street.

In a thunderous barrage of criticism, Sir Terence condemned the “dull and expensive traditional conformity” of the PM’s personal style, professing himself shocked by the dreary lampshades and mediocre occasional tables to be found behind the famous but so-last-century black front door. With the economy for which Sir Terence’s operations have always been noted, he then moved on smartly to praise Gordon Brown as a style guru worthy to rule the land.

Sir Terence is both right and wrong here. Yes, No 10 could stand a facelift. Jackie Kennedy’s White House it ain’t; we do not share the American tradition that expects every new First Lady to new-broom through the seat of power, junking dreary drapes and gold-rimmed banqueting ware like a bipolar House Doctor.

In Downing Street, the work of William Kent and Sir John Soane is betrayed by pompous, swagged curtains and chandeliers in the Cabinet room that look as if they were bought on eBay from a Worker’s Palace in the former Soviet Union. However, if Sir Terence thinks that the Chancellor would support the creative industries by flashing the place up with thrilling new designs from young British designers, he is mistaken. When Gordon and Sarah Brown occupied the flat at No 10 while the Blair tribe had the roomier accommodation of No 11, it was to their credit that they let the rooms become an archive of shabby-chic in high places and conducted ironic tours of Margaret Thatcher’s dank Laura Ashley bathroom, Norma Major’s operatic curtains and the plain G-plan table where John Major wrote his speeches — quite a collectible item now that 1970s retro is all the rage.

In a regime’s death spiral, there is much pleasure to be had in baiting its leaders into a defensive frenzy. At times like these, fate itself seems to join the pack, revealing new sources of misery for the embattled incumbents every day. The stylistas are running wild down Upper Street in Islington, brandishing their iPods and claiming victory, but should we be sneering at new Labour’s lack of commitment to new curtains when there are far more serious issues to join?

Of course it’s outrageous that Mrs Blair’s hairdresser charged the price of a Peugeot 206 for blow-drying her raven tresses on the campaign trail; it’s also outrageous that an unprincipled doctor can milk the NHS of £270,000 a year while thousands of nurses are going to lose their jobs because their hospitals can’t afford to pay them. Of these two outrages, only the second is important, and discussing the first in the same terms diminishes that importance.

Perhaps this is the plan. Perhaps a spin doctor was dispatched from No 10 to neck a few oysters at Sir Terence’s famous Bibendum restaurant and persuade the venerable patron to sortie with all guns blazing in this diversionary manoeuvre, creating yet another perfect day on which to bury a bad news story for the Government.

Style queens were the first to realise that Cool Britannia was nothing but an illusion of hype, hypocrisy and institutionalised bad taste. Their ideals were shattered convincingly by the dog’s-breakfast aesthetics of the Millennium Dome, a triumphant synthesis of the worst ideas from Le Cirque du Soleil and Luton Airport. Surely they should now be the first to twig that new Labour’s master plan was to make the trivial important and the important therefore trivial?

Over the past decade we have witnessed smoke-and-mirrors policy-making. Government by conviction gave way to kite-flying, repositioning and now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t illusions. The speed of the spin deceived the eye as quantifiable facts were juggled and vital issues reframed out of public debate. Fox hunting and cigarette smoking went to the top of the political agenda, drawing attention away from stealth taxes, the Iraq war and the implosion of the NHS. The strategy was brilliantly lampooned by David Hare in his play Stuff Happens; every night, when the actor playing Mr Blair tried to explain to President Bush that he couldn’t launch the Iraq invasion because he had to attend a reading of the foxhunting Bill, the audience howled with laughter.

It would be good if those snaps of foreign heads of state in conference with the Prime Minister featured chairs of cutting-edge British design instead of faux fauteuils apparently loaned by a Marriott hotel. It would be good if the lighting in the state rooms didn’t make our leaders look like zombies from Shaun of the Dead. It would be good if a fine British architect did something thrilling with the back of the house while a future-friendly designer chucked out the chintz. It would be even better if people who worked there had more on their minds than hanging on to their offices.

It would be good to have a Government with both style and substance, but of the two I'll take substance any day. Style is starting to look like the first cousin of spin. Enough already about Cherie’s lack of blow-drying skills. It doesn’t matter if the Prime Minister’s wife looks like a geography teacher in a tornado, as long as the Government deals honestly, openly and effectively with big issues instead of sneaking around them in a smokescreen of trivia.

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