Matthew Parris: My night sleeping in Churchill's War Office

Times

02-05-2025

Half a century ago I arrived in Whitehall as a young Foreign Office recruit. The building was tremendous, befitting a nation's once-confident imperial pomp. The decor of the state rooms breathed grandiosity — so long as you kept your eyes raised. Lower your gaze and you saw grubby taps, charladies filling buckets, and clerks wheeling trollies piled with dog-eared files down endless corridors. As an efficient office block for modern government the place was in the wrong century. Some proposed knocking it down.
They wanted to do that — unbelievably — to much of Whitehall. The 19th-century world of clerks and formality has long gone. In its place, in another of those old state buildings a stone's throw from the Foreign Office, has come… well, something astonishing. Imagine a lavish makeover, a billion pounds or so invested in an almost reverential adaptation, with top-of-the-range restaurants and bars, and state rooms where portraits of former statesmen gaze down on mahogany four-poster beds, silk curtains and velvety carpets. Like a dream of past glories, recreated for a generation whose world is anything but glorious.
Last week I spent a night in that dream. Whitehall's Old War Office — 'OWO' — is the place where, when I began at the Foreign Office, spies were reputed to keep company and the military top brass still met to mull the twists and turns of the Cold War. From its design at the turn of the 19th century and then for more than a century, the OWO corridors were paced by the likes of Asquith, Kitchener, Lloyd-George, Churchill, Slim, Eden and Profumo — a who's who of leadership in war and peace.
This is where a young Winston Churchill addressed staff from a marble balcony in the First World War and where orders for D-Day were finalised in the Second. A vast palace built in Edwardian baroque style, with a sweeping staircase designed so that officers in riding spurs would not trip, and acres of luxurious panelling that took a sizeable proportion of the forests of Empire to create. Domes and turrets soar, ceilings reach to the heavens, heavy doors with brass locks clunk satisfactorily. The views from the windows even now are of Guards on horseback across the road, and the Banqueting House from which Charles I stepped to his execution in 1649. It's at the epicentre of our nation's history.
And now, very discreetly, it has become a hotel of impeccable style. Apparently it took eight years to finish the conversion, longer than it took to build the OWO in the first place. Few of us frequenting Westminster had even noticed it happening.
At least on the outside. But I've now walked inside to a world I'm utterly unaccustomed to — and would indeed be unable to afford. 'Good afternoon, Mr Parris, I'm your butler,' said Mateusz Wojakowski, capable and welcoming, making no comment on my tattered old rucksack, and leading my partner and me down mosaic-floored corridors into a set of rooms that would make even a prince blush. There was a vast bed, the finest linens, chandeliers and a sitting room stacked with antiques. And the bathroom! The size of a small church, with a vast polished brass bath, gleaming gold on a plinth where an altar might rest.
The Haldane Suite must be the grandest room in the grandest hotel in one of the grandest cities on Earth (although, I'm told, the Granville Suite, with its wooden panelling and almost cathedral-style bedroom, is even more glorious). It became Churchill's office when he was secretary of state for war from 1919-21. The high, arching stucco ceilings are original, the great fireplaces even older, brought from the military command's original offices in houses on Pall Mall. The art on the walls comes from the private collection of the Hinduja family, who funded the new hotel. The three vast rooms run from one to the other in what the owners of stately homes call an enfilade — from bed to bath in a spectacular progression. The suite has been named after the reforming secretary of state for war — a Liberal MP and philosopher — but even this moderniser would have been astonished by the technology now slipped, almost invisibly, into his old offices. Curtains close at the touch of a tablet, subtle lighting dims and brightens, and a hidden enclave hides a bar, tucked in silent sliding draws. The bed is vast, the sheets perfect, the carpet deep, and the room, despite Whitehall outside, silent. I've rarely slept better.
The price (had I paid it) is embarrassing — the luxury almost too much to take in.
I had quietly expected the whole thing might be a bit flash, and I'd be able to tease the world's super-rich for their ostentation. But no. I have to report that the restoration is elegant and respectful, the regard for history spot on and even the pillows (I'm fussy about pillows) just the right balance between thin and puffy. My only regret was the walk through the suite to the loo, which seemed to take about ten minutes. I slept better than anyone deserves to in what was apparently once the office of the chief of the imperial general staff. I could almost hear him harrumphing at the impertinence.
Dinner in the Mauro Colagreco restaurant was a succession of luxuriant flavours: Scottish langoustine and shellfish in lime-heavy leche de tigre, with strips of kohlrabi; radish and poached scallops fresh and tangy — a world away from the overcooked steak and caviar I'd supposed oligarchs want. Before padding back to my imperial suite there was time for a Vesper Martini in the Spy Bar, deep in the basement, photography banned, and an Aston Martin behind the counter. Somehow even this seemed more authentic than showy.
There's hardly space here to tell you about the vast swimming pool buried deep underground, or the turret with a view over half of London … It was time to hang up my hotel dressing gown, pick up my plasticky rucksack and head out, past the limousines, into real life at Embankment Tube around the corner.
I have never really associated extravagance with good taste. Here was both. Though what Lord Kitchener would have thought of two gentlemen together in a bed in his office, heaven only knows.
The Haldane Suite begins at £16,000, raffles.com