The course of true power never did run smooth – and now Sir Keir Starmer is facing another backlash after removing a portrait of William Shakespeare from No 10.

Just weeks after ditching a £100,000 painting of Margaret Thatcher from a Downing Street study, the Prime Minister has yet again caused consternation by taking down the picture of the country’s greatest-ever playwright.

The portrait depicting the Bard and writer of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Twelfth Night, painted by Louis Francois Roubiliac, is part of the Government Art Collection.

While Downing Street has not commented on the incoming Prime Minister’s changes to the No 10 interior decor, office-holders are entitled to choose items from the collection to put on the walls.

Rather than saying that parting with the Thatcher painting was a sweet sorrow, Sir Keir said he did not like faces looking down on him and preferred landscapes.

He has also removed portraits of Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Gladstone, another former PM.

Former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden accused Sir Keir of “consigning Shakespeare to the dustbin”.

“Downing Street receives thousands of distinguished visitors every year,” he said.

“He should be using it to proclaim the greatest writer in the English language, not engaging in this philistinism.”

Tory leadership contender Robert Jenrick added: “We should celebrate and extol great figures in English history and stop being embarrassed by our identity. No other country would behave like this.”

The Thatcher painting, commissioned by former Labour PM Gordon Brown, was moved to another part of No 10.

Rachel Reeves was also slammed last month for replacing all of No 11’s pictures with paintings of or by women.

The Chancellor said she wanted to mark the lives of the “amazing women who have gone before us” but was accused of “pathetic gesture politics”.