Keir Starmer has rented out his home in north London since moving to Downing Street, according to newly published official records.
For rent: a four-bedroom home within easy reach of the shops, restaurants and bars of fashionable north London. It might be a good idea to look after the place, however. The owner is Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer.
After winning the general election in July, Mr. Starmer moved with his family into perhaps the nation’s most famous address, 10 Downing Street, freeing up the house in which he had lived for about two decades.
According to official records released this week, his home has now been leased, as has a south London house owned by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, who has also moved into her official residence, 11 Downing Street.
They are not the first senior British politicians presented with the dilemma of what to do with their properties when coming into power. Both the prime minister and the chancellor are given the use of a London home as well as a palatial country house for weekends.
In 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair was elected prime minister, he was advised against staying in his north London house for security reasons. But he was also warned against renting it out because of potential political embarrassment.
That was because of a scandal that arose several years earlier when a previous chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, unknowingly rented his west London apartment to a tenant who, tabloid newspapers gleefully discovered, worked as a sex therapist under the name “Miss Whiplash.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
