Downing St? We’d really rather not

The battle for power may be concluded but the property wars are only just beginning. In the pressure of late-night negotiations, the small matter of who would reap the benefits and curses of the Government's varied housing portfolio went untended.

One insider notes an "unholy scrabble" in the days since the coalition has formed to work out who will live where and on what terms, with the wives' club putting its foot down and deciding that civilian living arrangements are preferable to the top addresses.

Take Downing Street, which all politicians aspire to reaching, though strangely, there is no constitutional rule obliging the PM to move there and no one seems to much enjoy actually living there. The trouble is the upstairs layout, which includes one very nice four-room apartment with a large kitchen and airy dining room. Alas, it is located above No11 and was the cause of a stand-off when Tony Blair invoked his primus inter pares status (and large family) to swipe it off the then childless Gordon Brown.

David Cameron is continuing in the same tradition - though Samantha Cameron, in the middle of a school term and with a baby on the way, seems in no hurry at all to leave her pleasant North Kensington street for a place where the bathroom was designed by Margaret Thatcher, and looks like it.

One of Alistair Darling's dinner party tricks was to show off the Maggie-era facilities: huge loo, acreage of linoleum floor space and an old-fashioned sink that gushes near-boiling water.

It is not the sort of thing they feature in House and Garden, whose pages Sam's mother, Annabel Astor, graced recently to share with us the necessity of backing all our books in matching hand-blocked wallpaper.

No buildings on earth have as many extraneous sofas as 10 and 11 Downing Street: the Camerons will have to discover a retro interest in chintz and swags, since it is virtually impossible to change anything inside the building. Maggie Darling did her successors one favour by insisting on having the walls painted white and ditching the Cabinet Office catering in favour of hearty pies and chocolate pudding.

Because No10 is essentially a part of Whitehall with a flat attached - Mrs Thatcher complained that there was no one around after 7pm to make Denis an omelette if she didn't do it herself - it lacks the commitment to comfortable living that America's White House habitués take for granted.

The back stairs are in a pitiful state, with frayed carpets and boxes of fax paper stashed in the hallways. When someone discarded an old fridge, it took weeks for it to be picked up.

Cherie Blair notes in her memoirs that her first impression of the flat was Ken Clarke's cigar smoke and "a series of heavy mahogany wardrobes that smelt of cedar and mothballs. My heart sank at the sight of the kitchen. It might have been state of the art in the 1960s but that was then".

Improvements have followed, though all inhabitants take care not to appear to have spent too lavishly - not least in the present climate. This is not the time for calling the Rug Company on expenses.

For the Camerons, accustomed to open-plan living and tasteful Scandi-furniture, it will be a wrench. It is, however, symbolically essential that the First Family shows up in Downing Street - not least when the balance of power is as finely held as it is in this touch-and-go coalition.

Frances Osborne initially took one look at the cramped quarters on offer above No10 and said no thanks. She is rumoured to be unwilling to move her plentiful Osborne and Little curtains from north Notting Hill to the smaller apartment, despite the fact her husband wants her to so he can see more of the children and keep security costs to a minimum. She wants to use the No10 apartment for functions and for George just to stay there after those inevitable Treasury long nights. The couple have been talking about it since the beginning of this week. "There are big pressures on her to move," says a friend.

Mrs Osborne has told friends she needs a quieter place to write her best-selling books and values her own and their two children's privacy. That is hard to maintain at an address from which the only quiet exit is at the back, away from the tourists and cameramen. Prime ministers' children all end up as experts on St James's Park. Neither are Samantha and Frances so close that they would like to see each other every day. "A bit of separation will be more comfortable," says a mutual acquaintance. Relations between Mrs Blair and Mrs Brown foundered when they had to compete for party space and guest lists.

The trouble with Downing Street is it is equipped for only one politician with a growing family: even the large garden is shared and can be looked over by the Cabinet Office - so the Cameron children will find themselves waving up at Jeremy Hunt.

Mrs Brown began a vegetable patch; her successors will reap the autumn harvest of a Labour PM in more ways than one.

The demarcation lines between the two properties are not obvious. Cherie Blair, surveying "her" new flat on her husband's first day in office in 1997, found her arch foe Charlie Whelan smoking in one of the rooms under the firm impression that he was still under Gordon's roof. She artlessly helped herself to some of the trappings of the No11 flat, causing pursed lips among the staff.

After this domestic trauma, an escape to the country is essential. Mr Cameron, who has always had a fondness for stately homes (having married the offspring of one), has asserted his right to use the 16th-century Chequers in Buckinghamshire.

He has a Labour forerunner to thank for one thing: the Blairs insisted on having the swimming pool heated. The interior is, however, musty and dark in parts and feels semi-official. Cherie tried to have a 50th birthday knees-up there, only to find a crowd of hunt protesters blocking the path to guests.

It is also governed by arcane rules about who has to be in attendance - Mrs Blair found the staff removing the loo rolls the moment her husband left, on the grounds that supplies are only provided by the taxpayer when the PM is in residence.

The real prize in the property pack though is Chevening, the elegant 115-room Inigo Jones house in the Kent countryside. It is now home to an unusual house-share between Ffion and William Hague (Chevening is the traditional retreat of foreign secretaries) and Miriam and Nick Clegg, who as Deputy Prime Minister would usually get Dorneywood, though that would have annoyed George Osborne.

So Messrs Clegg and Hague will take alternative weekends, with Mr Hague having first rights to invite foreign guests and Mr Clegg using the house in the intervening weeks. "How many friends does a Lib-Dem leader have?" enquires a Foreign Office civil servant.

Although the size of the place seems ample for two families (a mere 57 rooms each), the centre of the house comprises dining and formal sitting rooms and a large billiard room and library. Having had David Miliband in residence, staff are used to small children - Mr Clegg has three. It's hard to imagine them rollicking around, however, while Mr Hague brushes up his next biographical tome in the library.

The Chevening gardens are expansive and verdant but with very long sight lines, so the prospect of privacy is reduced even outside. A fiercely complex maze is useful to detain children or lose tiresome foreign visitors.

The A-list gardener George Carter is working on a scheme to restore original character to the gardens, though politicians are kept at arm's length from such matters and all decisions about the house are handled by a trust.

It does, however, have a very impressive drinks cabinet. Chevening dinners are long affairs usually devoted to discussion of foreign matters. The library, with early editions of great statesmen's writings, is a bibliophile's dream to suit the intellectual Mr Hague.

Security is tight, with police stationed at the main gate and often bodyguards of visitors hanging around in the hall.

The price of publicly funded grandeur is very little space that cannot be invaded by staff or security. "Do not make faces in the lift," the Darlings used to warn No11 visitors, "It's all on camera."

"Good fences make good neighbours," wrote Robert Frost, and never more so than in a coalition. They'll just have to make it work, across some of the grandest garden fences in the land.