I was Boris’s No10 ‘nanny’
Ex-aide dubbed ‘the Gazelle’ paints colourful picture of time in Downing St during pandemic
A FORMER aide of Boris Johnson has likened her role to being his ‘nanny’ in an extraordinary inside account of working for him at Downing Street.
Cleo Watson, nicknamed ‘ the Gazelle’, paints a picture of the Prime Minister as ‘ a great unruly golden retriever’ who had to be ‘house-trained’ in Covid protocols.
Among her astonishing claims, Mr Johnson’s former deputy chief of staff says he had to be barricaded into his office with a makeshift ‘puppy gate’ when he was isolating.
She tells how she scolded him for making bad-taste jokes about the virus at the start of the pandemic – and claims he compared her to an ‘ugly old lamp’ that might remind someone of a failed marriage when he sacked her.
Miss Watson, 33, a protege of the PM’s former chief aide Dominic Cummings, lifted the lid on her time working for Mr Johnson in an article for society magazine Tatler.
The former No 10 insider, whose debut novel Whips! about salacious goings-on in Westminster is due to be published next year, said her role ‘sounds fancy, but a lot of the time I was much closer to being Boris’s nanny’.
When testing was limited at the start of the pandemic and Mr Johnson had his temperature taken to check for symptoms, it was often done by her, she says. She recalled: ‘“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.
‘This, plus the constant questioning about whether or not he’d washed his hands (“What do you mean by ‘recently’?”), the handwringing about his hair, which made him look even more like one of those troll toys from the 80s at the daily televised press conferences, and the frequent scolding about making gags such as “Kung-Flu” and “Aye! Corona!”, characterised much of the preterrifying brush-with-death era in the nursery.’
She also wrote of the ‘sheer bravery’ of Mr Johnson’s wife Carrie while ‘heavily pregnant and reckoning with the possibility that she might be about to lose the father of her imminent firstborn child’.
She said Mr Johnson later required ‘a fair amount of housetraining’ when ‘pinged’ by track and trace, and claims extraordinary measures were needed to keep him in one office while isolating, including ‘setting up chairs as barriers in the doorway’.
‘So the prime ministerial “puppy gate” was created. He’d kneel on the seats, his elbows propped over the top, like a great unruly golden retriever, howling for attention,’ she said. Miss Watson, who worked for the Leave campaign for Brexit, was brought into Downing Street in 2019 by Mr Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former chief adviser. The elegant employee was once dubbed ‘the Gazelle’ to Mr Cummings’s ‘pit pony’.
She said she ‘didn’t like it’ but was grateful it was not ‘actively mean’ like the ‘Duchess of Pork’, as Sarah, Duchess of York, was once called. Miss Watson was sacked shortly after Mr Cummings’s acrimonious departure and claims Mr Johnson said: ‘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. You’re that lamp.’
Miss Watson said she left No 10 ‘without a leaving party, contrary to what has been reported’.
Earlier this year, Sue Gray’s report into Partygate said that on November 27, 2020, around 15 to 20 people gathered in the No 10 press office to mark Miss Watson’s final day. It lasted less than hour with Mr Johnson there for around 25 minutes.
Miss Watson said in her article for the September issue of Tatler: ‘I went to the press team to say goodbye. 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.’
She said Mr Johnson looks ‘all the more hangdog’ following his resignation, adding: ‘ I always thought it would come to this: people would realise who he really is.’
No 10 did not comment yesterday on her claims in Tatler.
‘Like a dog howling for attention’