WHY DID CAMERON GET HOME LOAN DAYS BEFORE THE VOTE?

DAVID and Samantha Cameron took out a new mortgage just before the EU referendum.

They signed a home loan arrangement with HSBC on June 15 – eight days before polling day. It raises the question of whether the British Prime Minister knew the game was up well ahead of his emotional resignation speech in Downing Street.

The Camerons will vacate No.10 within three months, after a successor is chosen. But the Mail can reveal planning over their living arrangements appears to have been in train at the height of the EU campaign.

Just over a week before polling day, Mr Cameron and his wife found time to sort out the mortgage on their £3.5million Notting Hill townhouse in West London.

They each signed the HSBC mortgage deed, dated June 15, 2016, using their full names, according to publicly available Land Registry records. Their signatures were witnessed by Laurence Mann, who gave his occupation as ‘Political Secretary to the Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street’.

The documents do not reveal the size of the loan taken out, nor its purpose.

They did not previously have a mortgage on the property. The new loan, secured against the townhouse, could potentially help to fund the purchase of a property elsewhere. The Camerons already own two homes: a £1.3million cottage in his Oxfordshire constituency, and the four-bedroom Notting Hill house which they bought in 2006, for £1.1million in cash, using the profit on their previous home.

Since moving into Downing Street in 2010, they have been renting out their West London house – pocketing up to £7,000 a month from the tenants.

They are unlikely to want to move to their Oxfordshire house because it would disrupt their children’s schooling. Nancy, 12, attends a Westminster secondary school a short distance from Downing Street, while their son Elwen, ten, and youngest daughter Florence, five, go to a West London primary school.

Their old Notting Hill home is of great sentimental value to them, because it was where they one lived with their eldest son Ivan, who died suddenly in 2009 aged six.

They have spent £600,000 transforming the house with an eco-friendly makeover, demolishing the rear extension to construct a new kitchen and spacious basement.

The Camerons are no strangers to the property market. They scooped a reported £935,000 profit on selling

their first home in North Kensington, where they lived from 1995 to 2006.

Their house in the picturesque hamlet of Dean, near Chipping Norton, was bought for £650,000 in 2001 when Mr Cameron became MP for Witney.

Last night a Downing Street spokesman said of the latest mortgage: ‘People often change mortgages. It’s a common practice.

‘We didn’t know what the referendum result would be.’