CHEQUERS, the prime minister’s country house retreat, is a classic bit of English Establishment social engineering: Arthur Lee, a Tory MP who got a lot of money when he married a super-rich American banker’s daughter bought and restored the dilapidated Buckinghamshire manor house in 1912.

Lee thought that all prime ministers should relax in a country house at the weekend, but knew that the arrival of universal suffrage meant you could not always expect prime ministers to have one of their own. So Lee bequeathed Chequers to a Trust, which provides it to prime ministers to play the country gent in.

By giving prime ministers the luxury of the rich and accoutrements of the Establishment, Chequers helps ensure prime ministers will be less likely to take away any of the luxuries of the rich or challenge the establishment.

Like many British establishment manoeuvres, the Chequers scheme is hidden in informal, hard-to-penetrate private relations: the British government does not own Chequers. Instead it is owned by a secretive “trust,” which lends it to the prime minister of the time. The rules and practices of Chequers are not covered by Freedom of Information. They won’t even turn up in those Cabinet Office documents that get released to the national archives 20 years after the event.

The trust does not like to discuss how Chequers is run, or even who runs the trust itself.

Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, got caught up in a Chequers-related scandal, which also involved shares in McVities biscuits and a Daimler car.

Biscuit millionaire Sir Alexander Grant was a friend of MacDonald. Grant was shocked that MacDonald used the London Underground to get around, even when travelling to Chequers: MacDonald would take the Metropolitan Line to Amersham then get picked up in a Ford for the final 20 minutes of the journey.

Grant thought MacDonald should travel like a country gent as well as live like a country gent, so the biscuit businessman gave the prime minister a Daimler, along with £30,000 of McVities shares to pay for the upkeep of the car.

So a Tory businessman helped draw a Labour prime minister further away from the people he represented: the Labour leader already stayed in a country house and now he didn’t travel on the Tube.

Grant was made baron in the Honours list in 1924, shortly after he gave MacDonald the car, which looked sleazy — the Tories used to shout “biscuits” at MacDonald: so the biscuit shares were a poisoned gift.

Chequers subsequently stepped in to hide some of these gifts, with donations of cars and other goods being made to the Chequers Trust rather than the prime minister, so they could be used by future prime ministers without drawing any unnecessary attention.

Norma Major, wife of former Tory prime minister John Major, wrote a history of Chequers, which is a glossy love letter to the house, but also in the process reveals the ways it was used to bring prime ministers into line with the lifestyles of the Tory-minded country gents.

One grotesque example is that, among the largely boring artworks and historic furniture, Chequers prominently displayed the racist “Golliwog” doll. The Lee family, which donated Chequers to the trust, owned the original copy of US children’s author Faith Upton’s “Golliwog” book, along with the doll on which it was based. “Golliwogs” were American dolls made as grotesque caricatures of black people, drawn in the US slavery-era “minstrel” style. They were a popular children’s toy, promoted by the book.

The doll remained on display in Chequers until a scandal about it in 1983, when the doll was sent to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, as a historic example of prejudice in kids’ toys and stories. However, as Norma told us in 1996, the area where the doll was displayed “is still known as Golliwog corridor.”

Chequers, with its country-house style living, racist bric-a-brac and dull conservative art was one of many ways the representatives of the people were slowly turned into mediocre establishment bores. The Labour Party has cleverly avoided this danger by appointing a new leader who is already a mediocre establishment bore.