Welcome to the house of scandal, scares and squabbles, Mr vice president.<\/p>\n
Chevening is the ultimate ministerial perk. Apart from the prime minister\u2019s hideaway, Chequers, it\u2019s the most lavish of all government grace-and-favour mansions.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
But Chevening couldn\u2019t be more upper class \u2013 it was home to earls, viscounts and other titled aristocrats for 250 years – and has had an ungodly history.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Scandal<\/b><\/p>\n
Chevening faced scandal in 1999 when Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook\u2019s ex-wife Margaret, who loved the place, vented her fury at him taking second wife Gaynor Regan, who\u2019d been his mistress, to Chevening.<\/p>\n
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\u2019d paid for. <\/p>\n
In 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, just weeks after divorcing his wife Marina, then-PM Boris Johnson was accused of missing Cobra meetings as he spent two weeks at Chevening with then-girlfriend Carrie Symonds, now his wife.<\/p>\n
Scares<\/b><\/p>\n
The most alarming scare came when a senior diplomat apparently couldn\u2019t escape Chevening\u2019s maze. It\u2019s claimed an Italian ambassador who wasn\u2019t very tall had ventured into the maze.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Squabbles\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
Squabbles over the tenancy of this jewel of HM Government\u2019s grace-and-favour mansions \u2013 date back to Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s claimed that back in 1989, Sir Geoffrey, furious at being shuffled by 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.<\/p>\n
In David Cameron\u2019s 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\u2019s luxury.<\/p>\n
And under Theresa May, Johnson \u2013 then foreign secretary \u2013 was forced to share with not one ministerial colleague but two, Brexit secretary David Davis, and international trade secretary Liam Fox.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
And embarrassingly, when she became PM, she was asked to repay \u00a312,000 for missing bathrobes, lavish dinners and wine-fuelled summer parties during her Tory leadership campaign, though she disputed the amount.<\/p>\n
After Labour\u2019s election victory last year, deputy PM Rayner was said to have “locked horns” with Lammy over Chevening after she lost out to Rachel Reeves over the Dorneywood grace-and-favour mansion.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This weekend, despite Chevening\u2019s ungodly history, Lammy and the vice president are expected to deepen their relationship by attending 12th century St Botolph\u2019s Church, which is inside the vast grounds.<\/p>\n
In March this year, as their transatlantic bromance was burgeoning, they took mass together at the vice president\u2019s residence in Washington when he hosted the Lammy family.<\/p>\n
So with relations between the Labour foreign secretary and the Republican vice president so cordial, what could possibly go wrong?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just don\u2019t\u2019 go in the maze, JD!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the house of scandal, scares and squabbles, Mr vice president. Chevening is the ultimate ministerial perk.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-332090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115002232226896342","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}