He didn’t have the same impact as Sir Winston Churchill while living at 10 Downing Street, but that apparently hasn’t deterred Rishi Sunak from moving into another London property previously occupied by his illustrious Conservative predecessor.
I hear Sunak is considering buying a 19th-century house that Churchill lived in after losing the 1945 general election to Labour. The seven-bedroom house is on the market for £19.5m.
“Rishi and his wife visited the house with an estate agent,” a neighbour tells me. “It’s one of many properties they have visited in West London.”
It would represent a big step up the property ladder for Sunak and his wife, Akshata, the daughter of an Indian billionaire, as they currently own a much smaller home on a street in Kensington. They bought the house in 2010, a year after their wedding, for an estimated £4.5m. It is now worth about £6.6m.
Churchill originally owned the house next door to the one the Sunaks viewed, which he used as an office before purchasing this property for £7,000 and combining the two properties into one sprawling home.
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is considering buying a 19th-century terraced house that once belonged to Sir Winston Churchill
Mr Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty reportedly viewed the house with an estate agent.
Churchill lived at the property after losing the 1945 general election to the Labour Party and planned his political comeback there.
If the Sunaks buy the house, perhaps that will encourage the former prime minister to consider a political comeback? Churchill planned his return to Number 10 from the property, before winning the 1951 election for the Conservatives.
After his death in 1965, the house was sold as a single unit, but has since been redivided into two.
Last year, I revealed that the Marquess of Bath and his wife, Strictly Come Dancing star Emma Weymouth, had bought the property next door for £18.5million.
The marquess, whose ancestral home is Longleat House in Wiltshire, bought Churchill’s home from a multimillionaire divorcee whose ex-husband’s Nazi-supporting grandfather was convicted at the Nuremberg trials.
Friedrich Flick, a leading Nazi supporter, was a member of the Circle of Friends, a group of industrialists created to create links between business and the Third Reich. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Donatella Flick, who was married to Friedrich’s grandson Muck, bought the house near Hyde Park for £2.5m in 1996. She has defended Friedrich, claiming his imprisonment for crimes against humanity was a miscarriage of justice.
The Marquess of Bath, Ceawlin Thynn, and the Marchioness of Bath, Emma Weymouth, are due to join The Chiltern Firehouse in 2023. The couple bought the West London home for £18.5m last year.
Ceawlin Thynn (right) speaks to Prince William (left) as his wife looks on. The Marquess bought Churchill’s home from a multimillionaire divorcee whose grandfather, a Nazi supporter, was convicted at the Nuremberg trials.
He turned the bedroom where Churchill died into a living room dominated by black and white. “Very simple, very strict, a bit severe,” he explained. “That’s just me.”
Where Churchill’s bed had been, she placed a coffee table filled with glossy books and tall white candles.
Monogrammed cushions adorned black sofas, while on the staircase stood a bust of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the German conductor who fought accusations that he was a Nazi sympathiser.