A former Downing Street special adviser has made bizarre claims about outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson's time at Number 10.
In an article appropriately for Tatler magazine, Cleo Watson, who either resigned or was fired by Johnson November 2020, compared his determination to stay on as PM to the US Capitol building occupation in January 2021.
"He’s never exactly been the commitment type – except in this case, his reluctance to leave did seem a bit ‘let’s storm the Capitol, chaps’," Watson wrote.
The disgruntled ex-SPAD also confirmed rumours that Dilyn, the Welsh Jack Russell cross Johnson and his young third wife Carrie adopted from a rescue centre, was not well house-trained, and that the PM expected her to clean up after the mutt.
The incident in question took place during a "midsummer meeting at Chequers (falling between lockdowns one and two)" in 2020.
“We made our way upstairs to be greeted by an appalling smell and what I took to be a small fig under the table," Watson wrote. "‘Oh dear,’ the PM said, looking at me expectantly: ‘Dilyn’s done a turd.’ I adopted the exasperated teapot pose. ‘Well, you’d better pick it up then,’ I said. And he did”.
The last straw for Watson apparently came after Johnson's once-trusted senior advisor Dominic Cummings made his premature exit from Number 10 in mid-November 2020. She said Johnson compared her to an unwanted piece of furniture left to him after a divorce.
"He said a lot of things, the most succinct being: ‘I can’t look at you any more because it reminds me of Dom. It’s like a marriage has ended, we’ve divided up our things and I’ve kept an ugly old lamp'," she recalled. "'But every time I look at that lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You’re that lamp'."
Watson, a tall, slender blonde once dubbed the "gazelle of Downing Street", said she was deeply hurt by the comparison.
"A lamp! At least a gazelle has a heartbeat. Still, he presumably knows better than most how it feels when a marriage breaks up," she said in a belated dig at the thrice-wed father of seven.
But Watson denied reports, including in civil servant Sue Gray's anodyne report into the 'Partygate' affair, that she had been treated to a leaving party at Downing Street during the second lockdown.
“What actually happened is that we agreed to go our separate ways and I went to the press team to say goodbye," she wrote. "The PM, unable to see a group of people and not orate, gave a painful, off-the-cuff speech to a bewildered clutch of advisers and I left shortly after.”