Unsurprisingly, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (LLB) doesn’t judge No. 10’s recent occupants by their policies. Rather, it’s their interior design. First there was Theresa May, ‘desperately trying to keep everything lidded and controlled in mid-century John Lewis’. Then there was Boris Johnson in a ‘ridiculous operatic explosion’ of Lulu Lytle. As for Andy Burnham, he’ll probably go ‘mad for Manchester with graffiti everywhere’. If LLB were asked to redecorate No. 10, would he do it? ‘Well I’d have to really get a skittle on if it was for Keir Starmer, wouldn’t I?’ he laughs. But then he leans forward, almost conspiratorially: ‘Though I have to say that if I got a call from the current President of the United States, I’d probably say yes.’  

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Quite what LLB would envision for Donald Trump’s golden ballroom is probably not what ‘Maga’ acolytes would have in mind. This, after all, is the oft-described ‘dandy’ whose TV career brought sex-swing inspired living rooms, leopard-print bedrooms and walls of hair into home decor parlance. He claims that, since his first episode of Changing Rooms in 1996, only four people have ever disliked one of his makeovers: ‘I think the dream of me was far worse than the reality. People were so worried that I was going to turn their home into a Jacobean sex dungeon that when it was actually a Jacobean sex dungeon lite, they were kind of fine with it.’  

I, however, am not meeting LLB to discuss his sex dungeon vision for the White House. Instead we are discussing his art exhibition, ‘Drawn to Adorn’, which is touring the Cotswolds and Stratford-upon-Avon for the next week. We meet over videolink – he in his Gothic office in Cirencester (‘I tell American tourists it was designed by the same architect that did Hogwarts’); me in my brutalist flat in London. I daren’t give him a video tour of my rented, beige living room but he assures me the plant-cluttered ‘alcove’ (read: Ikea shelves) behind me is ‘refined’. He’s shunned his usual TV wardrobe of leather trousers and velvet blazers for a plain blue shirt and thick spectacles. After all, he reminds me,........

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