Eleanor Doughty
What to look for in a post-prime ministerial property
Who wouldn’t want their own little Chequers?
After the pomp of high office – the convoys of ministerial cars, police on the gates, the £840-a-roll wallpaper – what are a former prime minister and his spouse to do for a home? Boris and Carrie Johnson must be considering their next move. They might be hoping for the kind of arrangement that was put in place when Alec Douglas-Home lost the 1964 election. The new prime minister Harold Wilson ‘kindly put Chequers at our disposal for a day or two,’ Douglas-Home remembered. ‘Then [the hotelier] Sir Hugh Wontner, with great consideration, allowed us to stay in the penthouse at Claridges for a fortnight, so that a sense of perspective and pose was gradually regained.’ Sadly such generosity seems in short supply in the Conservative Party of 2022.
The day the Camerons moved out of Downing Street in 2016, they also had a pal on hand to help out, since their house in Notting Hill still had tenants. ‘We ended up staying at my friend Alan Parker’s house for a few nights before we found longer-term digs,’ Cameron remembered. ‘It was an odd first evening rattling around in a strange place, rooting for the remote control.’
Time was when prime ministers didn’t move into Downing Street at all and saved themselves the stress of moving out again. When he first became prime minister in 1885, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury preferred his townhouse in St James’s over the pokey Downing Street terrace. No. 20 Arlington Street had been a Cecil family home for a century, and by 1878 it could entertain over 1,000 people across its five storeys, one of which was a ballroom. ‘The family complained of the house being stuffy and ill-ventilated,’ explains Salisbury’s biographer Andrew Roberts, ‘but since the whole Conservative party of both houses could meet there, it served its purpose well.’
Both the Thatchers and the Majors had family homes ready to go when they left Downing Street. The Thatchers left Downing Street in November 1990 and returned home to their mock-Georgian house in Dulwich, overlooking the golf club. This soon proved impractical for the former premier and after three weeks of commuting to Westminster, the Thatchers were lent a duplex at 93 Eaton Square by Kathleen Ford, the widow of the American industrialist Henry Ford II. Coincidentally, this had once belonged to another prime minister, Stanley Baldwin. In 1991, the Thatchers bought a lease on 73 Chester Square where Baroness Thatcher lived until 2012, before her death the following year. The Majors had no need for leases. Leaving Downing Street in May 1997, they lunched first at the Oval before travelling with their children to Finings, their Cambridgeshire home where they spent the evening in the garden, enjoying ‘several bottles of wine,’ according to Sir John Major. ‘There were no red boxes, no immediate crises.’
Though the Johnsons have houses in London and Oxfordshire to choose from, perhaps Sir Tony Blair offers inspiration for their next move: a Chequers substitute. Leaving Downing Street in 2007, the Blairs added the Grade I-listed south pavilion at Wotton House, 15 miles from Chequers, to their property portfolio. Previously owned by the actor Sir John Gielgud, the south pavilion formed part of the Wotton estate which had until 1929 been owned by the influential and political Grenville family. It was said to have ‘ticked all of Cherie’s boxes. She wanted a small stately home within a 20-mile radius of Chequers.’
There are plenty of suitable options within that range of Chequers – though not for the £4 million that the Blairs spent in 2008. The eight-bedroom, five-bathroom, Grade II-listed and amusingly named Lord's Wood in Marlow is on the market for £8 million and comes with almost 35 acres and an outbuilding currently being used as an art gallery, perfect for the Prime Minister's painting hobby (Knight Frank).
Alternatively, Grade II-listed Bowers Farm in Coleshill, which dates to the 17th century, has a slightly more manageable ten acres, six bedrooms and a gym. It's on the market for £5.5 million and has its own Koi carp pond (Knight Frank).
