A commission to redecorate what Carrie Johnson is said to have called the ‘John Lewis nightmare’ left by the Mays must, then, have seemed an interesting prospect. That is, until the Electoral Commission launched an investigation in April into how the refurbishments – which ran to £88,000, leaving the PM liable for £58,000 once his £30,000 redecorating allowance had been used up – had been paid for, with reports that he had told aides the cost of the redecoration was ‘totally out of control’.

This month, the Conservative party was fined £17,800 for ‘serious donation reporting failures’ over the financing of the redecoration, dubbed ‘wallpaper-gate’.

Does she regret saying yes to the project, I wonder? ‘There’s no point having regret,’ says Lulu. ‘You’ve made a decision and then you just have to hope that the good side comes out.’ It was, she concedes, ‘incredibly difficult’ to be so out of control of the narrative.

‘Really maddening. I mean, the majority was misinformation, but in the swing of things you just have to cope with that. You can’t dwell. I had a business to keep running and people to keep working with and clients we had to keep. So actually, I think it would have been self-indulgent of me if I had become too preoccupied with it, although it was horrid.’

There were moments, though, when the sheer level of scrutiny was hard to cope with. ‘It was very odd and interestingly there were times, definitely, when it felt… yes, it did feel very unnecessarily personal. We weren’t really relevant.’

She has, she says, ‘learnt an awful lot’ and is grateful to the people who saw through the headlines. ‘I got wonderful letters from strangers and journalists – amazing people who wrote and that was all incredibly touching. You’ll never forget those people.’