Prime ministers have taken very different approaches to blending home and work life at Downing Street
Samantha Cameron once admitted that she was glad her children had left Downing Street before they became adolescents. It was easy to protect her children from the “weirdness” of life inside Downing Street when they were little, she said, but as they hit their teenage years, their lives would inevitably have become more difficult.
“The flat is very private but you’re living above the shop. All the security arrangements make it incredibly hard for people to come and go,” she said. “You are living in a fortress. It’s not normal.”
Whether Liz Truss’s family moves into No 10 or, more likely, 11 Downing Street – where every prime minister from 1997 onwards has chosen to live because its living quarters are larger, with an open-plan kitchen in trendy stainless steel – friends of the family say her two daughters, 16-year-old Florence and 13-year-old Liberty, are undaunted.
The girls are, apparently, “very excited” at the prospect of living in one of the world’s most famous addresses, where the back door leads directly into 23-hectare St James’s Park, already planning sleepovers with their friends at Downing Street and Chequers, with its huge lawn and heated swimming pool.
It is rare for prime ministers not to come to Downing Street with children in tow: David Cameron was the first prime minister to take paternity leave while in office but Boris Johnson was the fourth prime minister to welcome a baby to Downing Street when he and Carrie had their son, Wilfred, in April 2021.
Only once this century, when Theresa May was in No 10, has the UK had a prime minister without school-age children – but even those who came into No 10 with children in their 20s, such as Harold Macmillan, have filled the house with children’s parties to lighten the mood – especially at weekends when the atmosphere in the sprawling warren of 100 rooms is said to become sombre.
But exactly how – and, indeed, whether – the new prime minister blends work and family in Downing Street remains to be seen. Some prime ministers have made little distinction between private and personal lives: David Cameron said that, for his children, there was “no distinction between home areas and work areas, it was all theirs. It was one giant labyrinth to explore.”
Guests in the Cameron Downing Street living room were expected to balance kids on their knees. “I can remember at least once when the Cameron childcare fell apart and Florence had to join our 8.30am meeting. She sat on my lap, sucking a mint slowly,” Kate Fall, Florence’s godmother and Cameron’s deputy chief of staff when he was prime minister, has said.
Blair’s son Leo also made himself at home at No 10, according to the former Times editor Peter Stothard in his book 30 Days, a diary of his time tracking the then-PM in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Recalling a war cabinet meeting that he attended, Stothard wrote that “in the half-darkness, the rooms resemble the site of a hastily finished children’s party. The Thomas the Tank Engine train set is overflowing its box. At the bottom of the stairs, as though beguiling the prime minister to stumble, is a baby-sized drum kit with BAND in large letters on the bass”.
Other prime minsters and their spouses, however, have kept a clear distinction between home and work lives: Mary Wilson, for instance, installed a doorbell in her second-floor rooms to make sure no civil servant intruded. Norma Major took it to a further extreme and lived separately with the young children in Huntingdon for some of the time her husband, John, was prime minister.
Friends of Truss wonder whether the new incumbents might combine the two approaches: “She won’t be able to resist” moving into Downing Street rather than staying in Greenwich, one friend predicted.
But, they added, Truss’s husband, Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, could only be there “notionally”. Quieter and more reflective than his wife, O’Leary is said to prefer to keep a low profile, getting on with domestic life during the week while his wife is busy at Westminster. “He’s not going to be Denis [Thatcher],” said someone who knows Truss from her Greenwich days.
Added to which, O’Leary currently works mainly from home and, the friend suggests, is unlikely to want to do that from Downing Street. Instead, they predict, he could return to their south-east London home daily or find an office elsewhere, perhaps closer to Westminster.
On Thursday nights, however, friends say the work/life boundaries might blur: Thursday night in the Truss household is currently pizza night, with the family gathering together in their kitchen.
But Florence and Liberty can perhaps look forward to more than sleepovers. While Carol Thatcher reportedly hid in a cupboard when guests visited her mother, Margaret Thatcher, because she was wearing jeans, other teenagers have more than flourished: Euan Blair was 13 when he moved into Downing Street. Now 38, he is a tech entrepreneur on his way to becoming a billionaire.
And if Truss’s tenure at the address is a short one, the girls can always emulate another Downing Street child: Florence Cameron who, when the moment came to leave in 2016, tried to attach herself to the railings. “We are supposed to make a dignified exit,” her mother explained. “But I don’t want to go,” wailed the six-year-old.
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