His biographer claims that he found the £100,000 picture, commissioned by previous Labour leader Gordon Brown, “unsettling” just eight weeks after moving into Number 10.
However, Tory MPs have denounced his removal of the image as “petty” and “vindictive,” and calls have been made for the prime minister to put it back in Downing Street.
The fact that Sir Keir praised Lady Thatcher in a newspaper piece just months before the general election makes his seeming slight to her—prime minister from 1979 to 1990—all the more surprising.
In remarks that were sharply criticized at the time by left-leaning Labour MPs and trade union leaders, Sir Keir commended her for bringing about “meaningful change” in British politics.
He wrote in The news in December that Margaret Thatcher tried to “drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism.”
Tom Baldwin, a prominent advisor to Ed Miliband during his tenure as Labour leader and the writer of a perceptive and well regarded biography of Sir Keir, disclosed that Sir Keir had removed the artwork.
When Mr. Brown was prime minister and Lady Thatcher paid him a visit at Number 10, he commissioned the artwork.
