Gordon Brown appears to be getting to that post-Prime Ministerial age when details about his time in office begin to slip. Maybe one day he’ll truly believe he saved the world, however this weekend the main memory issue seem to surround Downing Street renovations. In an interview with The Telegraph over the weekend he was asked about flat-gate:

“Listen, Sarah and I never spent anything on No 10, because we were very aware that we were in a financial crisis and that any sign we were spending money would be seen as not sharing the problems that the country faced.”

In the midst of wallpaper-gate last year, however, the government published exact cost figures of Downing Street flat renovations, going all the way back to 1997-98. It turns out that Brown’s phrase, “never spent anything”, actually amounted to a whopping £103,284 spent by him and Sarah between 2007 and 2010. Additionally awkward for Brown is the revelation that the only years a PM actually spent no public cash renovating their flat were under his Tory successors, in 2012-13, 14-15 and 17-18. Still, what’s £100,000 to a man whose time at the top of government cost the economy £3 trillion…