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.”
Mr. Blair moved to Downing Street and instead of leasing his home, sold up, later regretting the decision when London property prices soared.
Mr. Starmer bought his north London property in 2004 for £650,000 (about $1.2 million at the time) and recently paid off his mortgage, according to British news media reports that cited various records.
In the past two decades, he put down strong roots in a part of London long favored on the political left. He has talked of frequent visits to his local pub, the Pineapple, from which he posted a photo on social media on Christmas Day last year with the message “Traditional Christmas drinks with neighbors in the local. Happy Christmas one and all.”
He has also regularly played soccer with some of his oldest friends on a field near his home and is a committed supporter of Arsenal, a Premier League team whose stadium is less than two miles away.
Mr. Starmer’s wife, Victoria, was reported by one newspaper to be “dreading” the move into Downing Street.
Nor were their two teenage children keen to leave the area where they have grown up. Before this year’s general election, Mr. Starmer recounted how his daughter has asked him whether, if he won, he would have to move into 10 Downing Street.
“I said, ‘Yes,’” Mr. Starmer recalled. “She said: ‘Just so you know, I am not coming.’”
Although Mr. Starmer’s property is only four miles away from his office in Downing Street, the family had little choice but to relocate, given the security concerns that surround a prime minister.
That risk was underscored even while Labour was in opposition earlier this year, when a group known as Youth Demand protested outside the Starmers’ house as part of a campaign to put pressure on Britain for an arms embargo on Israel.
On that occasion, three demonstrators hung a banner that read “Starmer stop the killing,” surrounded by red hand prints, and placed rows of children’s shoes at the front door.
Although renting out a property does not break any rules, the news that the prime minister and Ms. Reeves have leased out their homes and stand to gain financially may be seized on by Britain’s right-leaning news media, particularly after a recent set of damaging articles about the prime minister’s accepting free gifts in the past.
But for Mr. Starmer, taking in a significant profit from a house that is now estimated to be valued at more than £2 million — $2.6 million today — would scarcely be better received.
Leaving it empty would have been impractical, too. Mr. Starmer has a large majority in Parliament, and the soonest he is likely to need his house again is after the next general election, which is not expected before at least 2028.
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