The biggest row in Westminster rumbles on. No, it’s not Rishi against the spending ministers; nor Keir Starmer’s uneasy truce with Angela Rayner. Like a Jane Austen novel, the question centres on a grand country house, where passions have been aroused by a question of succession. The issue is of course Chevening: the 115-room grace-and-favour residence traditionally been used as the Foreign Secretary’s country house which the demoted Dominic Raab refuses to relinquish.
It’s not been a happy month for Raab; shifted in the reshuffle to the Ministry of Justice, he is reported to have demanded the post of Deputy Prime Minister as a consolation prize – a title which apparently now irritates him so much that he snaps at anyone who addresses him that way. His efforts meanwhile to retain the use of Chevening have raised a fair few hackles in Westminster, given that his successor Liz Truss has had to host Foreign Office meetings at the residence since she inherited Raab’s scheduled appointments last month.
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