No, Carrie – the Downing Street flat is actually a dream home
Eleanor Mills has visited the Whitehall apartment to meet prime ministers – and rather likes it
As the race to be the next prime minister hots up, all eyes are on Downing Street. The candidates, meanwhile, are also eyeing up that glossy black door – and thinking about what they will do once they get inside. Will they, like Rishi Sunak, who moved his family out of Downing Street earlier this year, eschew the grace-andfavour flat bestowed upon the prime minister in favour of their own pad? Or is our next potential leader planning a Carrie-style overhaul?
I was surprised to read that Mrs Boris Johnson finds the flat in Downing Street to be like a prison. When I’ve visited, I’ve found it light and airy, filled with incredible art and reeking of history. And I doubt many prisons are decked out with £900-a-roll wallpaper.
In fairness, Carrie’s comments were made in the context of her feeling cooped up at home with small babies and no personal space in lockdown. Her glamorously upholstered sitting room was the preserve of the prime minister and his special advisers at all times of the day and night, and she had no private outside space. The Downing Street garden – seen during Dominic Cummings’s press conference after his drive to Durham – is shared with the people who work in the government. I think she should be bit careful about moaning. Besides, part of being our leader is that you live above the shop. It’s not a nine-to-five job; you need to be on site.
I have interviewed two prime ministers in Downing Street. David Cameron was very positive about living above the office; he had small children at the time and said it was great to be able to pop upstairs and read them a bedtime story between meetings. My stepmother served in Tony Blair’s cabinet and she used to also report popping up to the flat to talk things over more informally with Tony or have a chat with Cherie. The impression given was that it was rather grounding to have the family upstairs; a welcome interspersion of domestic reality into the great matters of state.
That sense of dual function – office but also home – is part of what makes it special. As one former prime minister’s wife, who talked to me for this article on the basis of anonymity, put it: “Downing Street the building is run by a lovely, kind team who really go out of their way to make family life as normal as possible. They did everything they could to make it not be a prison and were extremely friendly. They knew what a challenge it would be living there for a family and were determined to do all they could to help us. I really appreciate what these lovely, lovely people did. They worked so hard to make us feel at home.”
The place is a strange mix of grand and grotty, palace and council office. It was gifted, along with a house overlooking Horse Guards, to Horace Walpole by George II. Walpole – who took up residence there in 1735 – suggested that the king make all the properties on the street available to future First Lords of the Treasury in perpetuity.
Walking through it is always a thrill. Once in the inner sanctum it is bright, with large Georgian windows, a black-and-white chequered floor, coat rails and wooden cubby holes where visitors leave their mobile phones. The famous staircase – yellow wallpaper adorned with black-and-white photographs of all the previous prime ministers – takes you up to a grand interconnecting first-floor set of wooden-panelled drawing rooms, where the Walpoles started an ongoing tradition of hosting parties.
The prime minister’s personal office is surprisingly unassuming. I’ve been inside several times and it remained much the same despite its change of owner – a large glossy table, armchairs, piles of papers, books. It’s strange that when you penetrate the centre of power it is much like anywhere else.
Back downstairs, the rooms intercommunicate, with standard office desks, computers and lavatories that you could find in a hospital: bog-standard loo roll, no fancy hand soap and lots of municipal grey linoleum. To get to the leader’s apartment you walk all the way through these offices and climb several flights of stairs to a separate door.
Once inside the prime minister’s flat, above No11 Downing Street, it is bright and airy, with high windows looking over Green Park. The flat above No 10 is much more poky: Blair swapped with his chancellor Gordon Brown because he had a larger family, and the arrangement has remained the same since.
I went there when I interviewed Theresa May. Carrie Johnson was withering about May’s “John Lewis” interior, ripping everything out for her gaudy Turkish bordello offering, but I remember May’s apartment being plain but comfortable: beige walls and carpets, red sofas, Jo Malone candles, flowers, some jazzy cushions – probably similar to the houses of many Telegraph readers. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of John Lewis.
The highlight of my visit was when May nipped upstairs to change out of the blue suit she’d worn for the formal portraits (one of the advantages of living above the shop is your whole wardrobe is available at any time) and came down in the leather trousers her spin doctor had decided struck the right note for the interview. They’d just been biked in from the designer and were rather too short for the tall and slender prime minister. We had to do the pictures with her sitting down so the lack of trouser-fit wasn’t an issue. They became a global sensation – as did the pictures of her flat.
The ins and outs of life in the prime minister’s flat hold such fascination for the public. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, leaders tended to use Downing Street just as an office, preferring to live in their own residences. But, by 1820, John Soane created a wood-panelled state dining room for more formal entertaining. By 1839, there were concerns about security. The surrounding area was awash with gin shebeens and brothels. In 1843, Edward Drummond, secretary to prime minister Robert Peel, was murdered in Whitehall by a man who mistook him for the leader. By the time Benjamin Disraeli became leader in 1868, the house was in poor shape – the living quarters had not been used for 30 years and Disraeli described it as “dingy and decaying” (a man after Carrie’s heart).
The public/private aspects of the house – and who pays for it – have always been contentious. Disraeli persuaded the state to pay for renovation to the entrance halls and public rooms, though he funded the refurbishment of the private rooms himself: he had a bath with hot and cold water in the First Lord’s Dressing Room installed for £150.3s.6d.
When William Gladstone arrived in 1880, he insisted on redecorating, spending £1,555.5s (a fortune at the time) on furniture. He also installed electric lighting and telephones. In 1937, central heating was installed, and the attic rooms were converted into a flat for the prime minister. During the Second World War, Churchill moved into an annexe above the war rooms. Afterwards, Downing Street was gutted and refurbished – it was supposed to cost £500,000 but ended up being double that. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had Quinlan Terry refurbish the shabby state drawing rooms.
The fine details of Sam Cam’s kitchen makeover 20 years later – where her kettle came from, which books she had on the shelves, her Oka throw – were pored over. The photograph of Cherie Blair having her make-up applied by her personal trainer on her double bed was similarly an object of fascination.
I’ve just been interviewing various 80s politicians and journalists, and was gripped by their tales of Thatcher inviting all the chaps in her cabinet “up to the flat” for her home-made fish pie during the Falklands crisis.
It is that melange of power and pie, world leaders and washing which is so poignant; the domestic mundanity of the place reminds us that our leaders are human beings, too. They eat breakfast and go for a shower; command troops to go to war and then nip upstairs to bed. We are fascinated by the seat of power because of the light it sheds on how leaders live; how they are like us, yet not. Ordinary, yet apart. And Downing Street is the stage where it all unfolds.
‘It was rather grounding to have family upstairs and the great matters of state downstairs’