Lifting the lid on Gove’s faux marble loo

 
P16 Diary
16 January 2013

While flats are selling like hot cakes in the Battersea Power Station development, the North Kensington property market is taking a little longer to cook.

As we reported in December, Education Secretary Michael Gove and his Times journalist wife Sarah Vine have put their family house on the market for £1.35  million, but it is yet to sell.

There’s one curious detail. Nosing through the photographs when they were first posted online, the Londoner discovered that Gove has a cartoon portrait of himself above the bathtub, dressed as a schoolmaster berating some children, and a faux marble loo seat.

However, the revelation of this seems to have caused some embarrassment in the Gove household as the estate agent has removed the bathroom picture from its particulars.

“It would be a breach of client confidentiality to discuss it,” says the man at the estate agency trying to flog the four-bedroomed semi in the slightly unfashionable area to the north of the Tory heartlands of Notting Hill.

Pictures of what the agents call a “charming” house, full of Moroccan rugs, groaning bookshelves, and the odd splash of trendy taupe on the walls, remain on the website but the Under Offer banner has yet to go up.

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