Welcome to the house of scandal, scares and squabbles, Mr Vice President.
Chevening is the ultimate ministerial perk. Apart from the prime minister’s hideaway, Chequers, it’s the most lavish of all government grace-and-favour mansions.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy says he and his weekend house guest JD Vance get on because they “share a similar working-class background” and are “both Christians”.
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But Chevening could not be more upper class. It was home to earls, viscounts and other titled aristocrats for 250 years – and has had an ungodly history.
Set in 3,000 acres in Kent countryside, this 17th-century mansion has a lake, marble fireplaces and chandeliers, 13 Roman tombstones and a suit of armour from the Spanish Armada.
Chevening House. Pic: PA
Chevening faced scandal in 1999 when Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook’s ex-wife, Margaret, who loved the place, vented her fury at him taking second wife, Gaynor Regan, who had been his mistress, to Chevening.
In a bitter memoir, A Slight and Delicate Creature, in which she accused him of womanising and drunkenness, Margaret wrote acidly that she hoped Gaynor enjoyed the food and drink that she had paid for.
In 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, just weeks after divorcing his wife Marina, PM Boris Johnson was accused of missing Cobra meetings as he spent two weeks at Chevening with then-girlfriend Carrie Symonds, now his wife.
The most alarming scare came when a senior diplomat apparently could not escape Chevening’s maze. It’s claimed that an Italian ambassador who was not very tall had ventured into the maze.
So the story goes, wearing an exquisite dark blue designer suit and Gucci loafers, His Excellency was lost in the maze for over an hour and tore his clothes and muddied his fancy shoes.
Then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson with the Czech Republic’s deputy foreign minister Ivo Sramek at Chevening in 2017. Pic: AP
Squabbles over the tenancy of this jewel of HM Government’s grace-and-favour mansions date back to Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe and have continued to a present-day rivalry between Mr Lammy and Angela Rayner.
It’s claimed that back in 1989, Sir Geoffrey, furious at being shuffled by Mrs Thatcher from the Foreign Office to Leader of the Commons, turned political assassin and triggered her downfall partly because of the bitter blow of losing Chevening.
In David Cameron’s Coalition government, foreign secretary William Hague and the Liberal Democrat deputy PM Nick Clegg were forced to take it in turns to enjoy weekends in Chevening’s luxury.
And under Theresa May, Mr Johnson – then foreign secretary – was forced to share with not one ministerial colleague but two, Brexit secretary David Davis and international trade secretary Liam Fox.
More recently, another foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and deputy PM Dominic Raab fought a bitter battle over who was entitled to spend weekends there. Eventually, she called it an “exalted flat share”.
Liz Truss attends a meeting with European Commission VP Maros Sefcovic in 2022. Pic: Reuters
And embarrassingly, when she became PM, she was asked to repay £12,000 for missing bathrobes, lavish dinners and wine-fuelled summer parties during her Tory leadership campaign, though she disputed the amount.
After Labour’s election victory last year, deputy PM Rayner was said to have “locked horns” with Mr Lammy over Chevening after she lost out to Rachel Reeves over the Dorneywood grace-and-favour mansion.
In the Blair years, hair-shirt chancellor Gordon Brown had no interest in luxury stately homes, so Dorneywood was given to John Prescott, who was famously photographed playing croquet when he was supposed to be running the country.
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This weekend, despite Chevening’s ungodly history, Mr Lammy and Mr Vance are expected to deepen their relationship by attending 12th-century St Botolph’s Church, which is inside the vast grounds.
In March this year, as their transatlantic bromance was burgeoning, they took mass together at the vice president’s residence in Washington when Vance hosted the Lammy family.
So with relations between the Labour foreign secretary and the Republican vice president so cordial, what could possibly go wrong? Just don’t go in the maze, JD.
