The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
If walls could talk…
Harry Mount reveals the secrets of Chequers, the PM’S country retreat
‘AT CHEQUERS, THATCHER COULD BE THE COUNTRY HOUSE CHATELAINE’
It’s 100 years since Chequers became the official retreat of serving prime ministers: a place to kick back, relax… and broker history-making deals with world leaders away from the public’s prying eyes. Harry Mount speaks to former PM David Cameron and other house guests to find out what it’s like behind closed doors
The inscription on the stained-glass window in the hall at Chequers reads, ‘This house of peace and ancient memories was given to England as a thank-offering for her deliverance in the Great War 1914-18 as a place of rest and recreation for her prime ministers for ever.’ A century ago, in 1921, Lord Lee handed over the 10-bedroom, 16th-century country house in Buckinghamshire to David Lloyd George. Ever since, it has been beloved by prime ministers as exactly that: ‘a place of rest and recreation’.
‘The key is that it’s the one place you can relax and work, because you are so well looked after,’ David Cameron tells me. ‘And it’s brilliant for soft-power diplomacy.’ Chequers allows prime ministers to hold international and domestic summits in the grandest, most quintessentially English of settings. It’s also an unusually cosy bolthole for them and their families, where they can get away from the pressures of London.
The dominant notes at Chequers are Elizabethan stone and wood panelling, set off by splashes of modern decor. Its floor plan is simple. The entrance porch leads into the small Stone Hall. Leading off the hall is the Hawtrey Room, originally the Great Chamber, the biggest room in the Elizabethan house. That has been superseded by the Great Hall, the lofty centrepiece, which rises through two floors, with a gallery along one side. This was created in the 19th century by roofing over the inner courtyard. The bedrooms and service rooms are wrapped around this central core.
Unlike Downing Street, it isn’t well set up for modern office working, but it is the most comfortable of all the grace-and-favour houses allotted to senior politicians. ‘Deep-carpeted bathroom with chintz furnishings,
floral wallpaper,’ Rachel Johnson wrote of her quarters in Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis. ‘Even toiletries! There were never any toiletries at Chevening, the country residence of the Foreign Secretary.’
Still, for all its splendour, much about Chequers is strangely ungrand. Norma Major, who wrote Chequers: The Prime Minister’s Country House and its History in 1996, took to the cosy White Parlour: ‘John and I, like Denis and Margaret Thatcher before us, very much enjoy the informality of a “television” meal on a tray here, when the
Johnson takes a relaxed approach, racing around the grounds on his dirt bike
contents of the red boxes can be set aside for an hour or two.’
Visitors get to see prime ministers drop their guard. The historian Lady Antonia Fraser remembers going there as a teenager, for a Christmas party, soon after Clement Attlee came to power in 1945. She was at a family party for children of Labour government members including her father, Lord Longford. ‘We were in the hall with its great fireplace,’ says Lady Antonia. ‘There was a big screen in front of the fireplace. Suddenly Father Christmas came down the chimney – Mr Attlee in a Father Christmas outfit – and popped out from behind the screen.’
The latest incumbent, too, has completely taken to life at Chequers – and its sports facilities. When Boris Johnson came to power, the first thing his sister Rachel did was to text David Cameron to ask if there was a tennis court at Chequers. ‘Yes – a good one,’ Cameron says. ‘Blair had it resurfaced.’ Johnson takes a distinctly relaxed approach to the house. Only a few weeks ago, he was racing around the grounds on his Yamaha 125cc dirt bike (a present from Carrie), with Michael Gove riding pillion. They were celebrating the birthday of Henry Newman – a former aide to Mr Gove and a close friend of Carrie’s.
Not all prime ministers completely relax there. Ferdinand Mount, my father, head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1982-3, remembers her welcoming him into the hall at Chequers. ‘Isn’t this a wonderful room?’ she said. ‘Don’t you feel relaxed as soon as you come through the door?’ In his memoir, Cold Cream, my father writes, ‘Mrs Thatcher gives these polite sentiments her usual forceful treatment, as she bustles into the hall, but she carries no conviction at all. [For her] Chequers is a place for redoubling one’s efforts, for getting back to it all in spades. Meetings continue all afternoon and sometimes long after dinner throughout the weekend, until even her beautifully coiffed head begins to sink on her briefing papers.’
At Chequers, Thatcher could also be the country house chatelaine. Vanessa Thomas, widow of Hugh Thomas, the historian and chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies, remembers lunching at Chequers. She was sitting two away from Mrs Thatcher. Lady Thomas says, ‘I broke off a piece of my bread – it must have been something delicious in a sauce – and wiped my plate clean with it, as they often do in France, but obviously not in Grantham. Margaret Thatcher leaned across
to me and said in a clear voice but kindly manner, “There’s plenty more, dear.”’
One of the oddities of Chequers is that it is staffed by the armed forces – a tradition that began during the war, when it was tricky to get civilian staff. It was first staffed by the Royal Air Force and the Army. After the war, the Army was replaced by the Navy. When Boris Johnson was giving his sister a guided tour, he pointed out a map chest owned, he said, by James II. ‘It’s James I, actually,’ said a flunky in RAF uniform. The staff never address the PM by name. ‘We call them all Prime Minister,’ the housekeeper told Rachel Johnson. ‘So we don’t get their names wrong.’
‘It is all too perfect and a little eerie,’ says Ferdinand Mount of the Chequers set-up. ‘Then it becomes much odder as you see women in RAF uniform bringing in the tea or stoking up the fire. You look out of the long Tudor windows and see the security people slowly circling the house at a discreet distance beyond the ha-ha.’ In one meeting with Mrs Thatcher, Mount looked out of the bow window to see Denis Thatcher in his red baseball cap and matching golf jacket, swinging his eight iron: ‘With ever-growing envy, I watched him line up half a dozen balls and, with his short, rather stiff swing, despatch them over the ha-ha in the direction of the nearest policeman, who began to gather them up as a welcome diversion from the tedium of staring over the parkland.’
That stiff security means invaders are rare. In 1921, not long before the Irish Civil War, a group of young Irishmen were found in the grounds. They claimed to be medical students on holiday from Dublin, although Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, didn’t believe them.
Prime ministers can stay for as long as they like. The staff remain on permanent standby, in case of sudden developments – like the spell of self-isolation Boris Johnson spent at Chequers in July after coming into contact with the Covid-infected Health Secretary Sajid Javid.
Other diversions at Chequers include the swimming pool, given by the American ambassador to Britain, Walter Annenberg, in honour of President Nixon’s visits in 1969 and 1970 – although Mrs Thatcher saved £5,000 a year by turning off the heat in the pool. Carol Thatcher once had a race there with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife, Lord Hailsham and Robin Day’s wife Katherine. Norma Major taught herself to swim in the pool.
PMS also enjoy a fine picture collection, much of it donated by the Lees, including several Constables and a Rubens of The Lion and the Mouse – Churchill got out his paintbrush to highlight the near-invisible mouse. Such a hands-on approach is not encouraged – PMS can only make tiny changes to the listed building. Carrie Johnson will not be able to plaster the walls with £840-a-roll wallpaper, although Margaret Thatcher did refurbish the Lee Room with chintz. During her tenure, centuries of varnish were also removed from the panelling in the Great Parlour.
The grounds are crammed with trees planted by prime ministers. Younger PMS use the lawns for impromptu games of football. David Cameron remembers Boris Johnson playing a competitive game. Cameron says, ‘Boris slide-tackled one of his children so vigorously that they had to retire hurt.’
As for welcome guests, prime ministers can invite anyone: friends for private parties; the great and the good for public occasions. Charlie Chaplin stayed with Ramsay Macdonald in 1931 and performed his act in the neighbouring countryside for the ‘amusement of the crows’. Winston Churchill stayed up until 3am with Anthony Eden, watching Gone with the Wind and planning the North African campaign. He had Noël Coward to stay, begging him to play Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans. Cameron had Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton as guests.
Pets are welcome too – if well behaved. Johnson’s terrier Dilyn was in the dog house recently after chewing the Chequers furniture, leaving the PM with a hefty repair bill.
The house strangely combines grandeur with austerity. When Rachel Johnson dined there for the 79th birthday of her father, Stanley, in 2019, the wine came from Boris Johnson’s Tesco order, paid by him personally. All private hospitality at Chequers comes out of the PM’S pocket.
Public events, though, are paid for by the Government. And that’s where Chequers comes into play as the ultimate soft-power tool. It isn’t just prime ministers who love Chequers – so do their foreign counterparts.
David Cameron says, ‘Angela Merkel suggested holding a meeting at Chequers because she had so enjoyed her first visit when we sat up drinking whisky in front of a roaring fire in the Long Gallery.’ On one walk, Cameron took a wrong turn on top of nearby Coombe Hill and had to help Merkel over a
Denis Thatcher was spotted despatching golf balls over the ha-ha
treacherous fence. He says, ‘She laughed at the obvious joke about the Englishman, the German and the barbed-wire fence. The farmer spotted our difficulties and put in a stile, now known as the Merkel crossing.’
A nearby pub, the Plough at Cadsden, became a regular haunt for Cameron and his guests. President Xi of China accompanied him there for fish and chips and a pint. Cameron says, ‘He enjoyed it so much that a group of Chinese investors later bought the pub and plan to launch a chain called “The Prime Minister’s Pub” across China.’
It was at the Plough that David and Samantha Cameron also accidentally forgot their daughter, Nancy, aged eight. Cameron says, ‘Months later, Matt, the superb cartoonist from The Telegraph, sent us his drawing of Nancy sitting dejectedly at the bar of a pub, with the speech bubble saying she was worried about leaving her father to run the country. It is in her bedroom today.’
So how did Chequers end up as Britain’s most political country house? The estate goes back to 12th-century owner Elias Ostiarius, an official of the King’s Exchequer – thus the name ‘Chequers’. Ostiarius’s descendants lived there for 500 years. Among them was William Hawtrey, who erected the current building in 1565, the year he was ordered by the Privy Council to imprison Lady Mary Grey, sister of Lady Jane Grey. She offended Elizabeth I by not asking for her consent for her lowly marriage to sergeant porter Thomas Keyes. For two years, she was confined to the Prison Room at Chequers. ‘A few people who came to stay thought that Lady Mary Grey’s bedroom was haunted,’ Cameron remembers.
Cameron’s younger daughter, Florence, slept in a cot next to the Prison Room. His elder daughter, Nancy, aged six when her father came to power, took to giving historical tours of Chequers, saying, ‘We won’t be living here for long – it’s only while Dad’s Prime Minister.’ Cameron adds, ‘She’d point out famous connections with the house, including one “Oliver Crumble”.’ She’s quite right: Oliver Cromwell’s grandson John married the owner of Chequers in 1715.
In 1909, Chequers was bought by Arthur Lee, Conservative MP for Fareham, when he was made a peer, and his wife, Ruth, daughter of a rich American businessman, John G Moore. Ruth’s money paid for Chequers – and for it to be stripped of its 19th-century Gothic embellishments and returned to Tudor brick mullions, pediments, bay windows and towering chimneys. The couple had no children, and Lee served in Lloyd George’s last govern
‘A few people who came to stay thought that Lady Mary Grey’s bedroom was haunted’
ment. Thus came the magnificent present of Chequers to Lloyd George and future prime ministers in 1921. The Lees explained their gift in the visitors’ book that year: ‘Chequers has a great part to play in the moulding of the future. In freeing it for this high task, we are doing the best service to our country that it is in our power to render.’
And how the PMS have loved it – except for Bonar Law, who didn’t serve long enough to live there. Photos of the other 18 PMS who’ve lived there (not yet including Boris Johnson) hang in a gallery – well, they should. Rachel Johnson asked her brother at a Chequers breakfast in 2019, ‘Where’s Gordon Brown?’ ‘He fell off the wall,’ Boris said.
But then the joy of Chequers must end for every one of its occupants. When Churchill left for the first time, in 1945, he simply wrote in the visitors’ book, ‘Finis’. In 2019, Theresa May wrote, ‘Chequers is a special place but what made it so special was you, the staff.’
That is the tragedy of Chequers – this magical gift disappears at the exact moment your political career crashes. Sir Ronald Millar, a playwright and speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, once spotted her on a stool before the fire in the Great Parlour. ‘Sitting there like that,’ he said, ‘you look for all the world as though you belong to Chequers, and Chequers belongs to you.’ ‘But it doesn’t,’ she said. Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Penguin, £9.99)