A former aide to Boris Johnson has revealed how her role amounted to being his “nanny” during the pandemic.
Cleo Watson, Johnson’s former deputy chief of staff, said they had to barricade the PM into his office with a “puppy gate” when he had to isolate.
“My role at No 10 sounds fancy, but a lot of the time I was much closer to being Boris’s nanny,” she wrote for Tatler.
Watson had to take the prime minister’s temperature to check for Covid symptoms, describing it as: “One hand on a hip, teapot-style, and the other brandishing an oral digital thermometer. ‘It’s that time again, prime minister!’ I’d say.
“Each time, never willing to miss a good slapstick opportunity, he dutifully feigned bending over.”
When the PM was “pinged” during the pandemic they had to set up chairs as barriers to the doorway of his office while he was isolating.
“So the prime ministerial ‘puppy gate’ was created,” she wrote.
“He’d kneel on the seats, his elbows propped over the top, like a great unruly golden retriever, howling for attention.”
Watson said she had to constantly question Johnson about whether he had washed his hands and scold him for making “gags” such as “Kung-Flu” and “Aye! Corona!”
Watson, who was sacked by Johnson in November 2020, also revealed she once told the PM to pick up his dog’s poo.
Describing a meeting at Chequers, the PM’s countryside retreat, she said: “We made our way upstairs to be greeted by an appalling smell and what I took to be a small fig under the table. ‘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.”
Watson, who worked for the Vote Leave campaign, was brought into Downing Street by Dominic Cummings.
The 33-year-old was sacked by Johnson soon after Cummings was booted out in an exchange in which the PM compared her to a lamp.
Watson claimed the PM said he could not look at her any more because it reminded him of “Dom”, saying: “It’s like a marriage has ended, we’ve divided up our things and I’ve kept an ugly old lamp. But every time I look at that lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You’re that lamp.”
Watson has since written a novel Whips! set in Westminster and due to be published in May 2023.