The lost art of office furniture peacocking

When Donald Trump was pictured at the tail-end of his tenure as President, sitting uncomfortably at a table that looked like it had been retrieved from a skip, it provoked the sort of sneering commentary about office furniture choices previously seen when Dominic Cummings popped in to the Downing Street garden to deliver some self-serving blather from behind a rickety trestle.

Both men are routinely described as megalomaniacal and Machiavellian. But their choice of crappy, low status furniture doesn’t align with any reasonable idea of the right trappings for those sorts of individuals.

Vladimir Putin on the other hand, has no such qualms. The ridiculous tables he uses for meetings are a throwback to an age in which nasty, egotistical tyrants and windbags  never hesitated to manifest their characters in their surroundings. And make sure everybody else knew exactly where they fitted in.

At the very least they would always seek to humiliate their underlings, for example with the farting, low-slung chairs CJ invites Reggie Perrin to sit upon.

For those with higher aspirations than bullying the middle managers at Sunshine Desserts,  you would envisage something a bit special. You expect Bond villains to sit at a £25,000 Bodil Kjaer desk. You want the various schemers in Game of Thrones to enjoy a throne worthy of the name. You want their office to look like Tyrell’s from Blade Runner (main image). If the next generation of political chancers and schemers want to live up to their image, they really need to work on their office furniture game.