"we have authority to buy anything under £250 without clearing it with one another."

Ten handbags at £249 each then... ;-)

I would clean or replace the plug and air filter. Always drain down at the end of the season as well. Then always use fresh petrol at the start of the next season. I have a cheap mower, Italian I think, but the engine is B&S and it will start after one or two pulls at the time of the first cut.

Sons just bought a secondhand petrol Mountfield mower, paid a very reasonable £50 for it, runs and cuts a treat.

I've only got a fairly small area of grass back and front, hesitate to call.it a lawn, got dogs! So my corded qualcast suits me.

Used to have a petrol Mountfield which could be a pain to start. Quick fix was a squirt of electrical contact cleaner into the carb, then pull the cord. Big bang then motor running.

Thought about electric but they cost and most available s/h were being sold because of electric start failure. I suspect the primary cause was overwintering in a cold damp shed which kills batteries.

Subsequently moved and with a smaller garden bought a battery mower as a replacement. On a 5AH battery it will just about do front and back covering ~120sq m (much of the outside space is paved).

Not a lawnmower but some Mountfield hedge trimmers with a two stroke petrol engine I have were difficult to start and keep running. The local repair man recommended using Aspen 2 petrol which is completely alcohol free and improved running no end. There is another version, Aspen 4 for four stroke engine (without oil in it).

How to improve starting for your garden equipment. Whatever it is -do this. Don't use fuel with ethanol

My two petrol mowers (Mountfield Empress -Briggs &Stratton; Atco 17" -Villiers) date from the last century and have always started perfectly well with unleaded and now E10.

When you finish mowing, keep the engine running, turn off the fuel from the tank to the carb, keep running the engine flat out until it starts to falter, if manual choke, gradually keep closing the choke to empty the carb float chamber, then totally close the choke as the engine dies. If it has an auto choke ignore closing the choke.

I have never (waste of fuel) and would not ever do this. There is a risk that the float might stick (it occasionally does on the Villers) and fail to rise to shut off the inlet valve, resulting in fuel overflow. It also exposes the interior of the chamber to cool damp air, with resulting condensation and corrosion.

Pull the recoil starter until you can feel it's on compression and leave it there, this closes off the cylinder from the atmosphere and protects the valves from corrosion.

Makes sense in theory for a single cylinder engine; in practice it doesn't seem to matter. In multi-cylinder vintage cars with infrequently used engines several decades old (obviously impossible to ensure all cylinders airtight at rest) I have never heard of 'valve corrosion'.

(if your mower hasn't got a fuel tap - some don't nowadays - get one fitted, plenty available on Amazon) Our oldest mower from 2010 is a GGP/Mountfield small ride-on...

The Briggs & Strattons in my Empress and the equally ancient churchyard Mountfield rotary (which I also maintain) have no fuel tap. They really aren't necessary (cars don't have them - and I doubt if many motorbikes do) and , in the case of the one on my 60+ yr old Atco, just something else to go wrong; I had to replace the seizing/leaky original some years ago

Here's a piece of advice which I don't think has been mentioned: at the end of the season, brush and sc***e it clean (especially if it's a cheap rotary steel deck as opposed to a quality Mountfield aluminium job) and paint exposed metal bits (and also the difficult-to-get-at back plate on cylinder mowers) with old engine oil. Otherwise a steel deck, even if galvanised, can rust through in only a few years.

I wonder if we will hear from the now well-informed OP?