For Rent: A 4-bedroom London house – owned by Britain’s prime minister?
After winning the general election in July, Mr. Starmer moved with his family into perhaps the nation’s most famous address, 10 Downing Street, freeing up the house in which he had lived for about two decades.
According to official records released this week, his home has now been leased, as has a south London house owned by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, who has also moved into her official residence, 11 Downing Street.
They are not the first senior British politicians presented with the dilemma of what to do with their properties when coming into power. Both the prime minister and the chancellor are given the use of a London home as well as a palatial country house for weekends.
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In 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair was elected prime minister, he was advised against staying in his north London house for security reasons. But he was also warned against renting it out because of potential political embarrassment.
That was because of a scandal several years earlier when a Conservative chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, unknowingly rented his west London apartment to a tenant who, tabloid newspapers gleefully discovered, was a self-described sex therapist working under the name “Miss Whiplash.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe. More about Stephen Castle
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