Uncomfortable truth about TROUSERGATE
Theresa’s £995 leather trews? They weren’t even hers ...but were forced on her by pushy aide
THE explosive ‘Trousergate’ row between Theresa May and a Tory MP blew up because one of the Prime Minister’s controversial aides insisted on her wearing the £995 leather garments, it was revealed last night.
Mrs May’s former director of communications Katie Perrior says that Fiona Hill ‘begged’ top designer Amanda Wakeley to send over the trousers for the now infamous photoshoot – to replace Mrs May’s own clothes.
It led to an extraordinary row after former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan asked how she was ‘going to explain this in Loughborough market’, adding: ‘I’ve never spent that much on anything – apart from my wedding dress.’
The Mail on Sunday then revealed that Ms Hill erupted after reading her remarks, banning Mrs Morgan from Downing Street.
Ms Hill and her joint chief of staff Nick Timothy, both long-serving aides to Mrs May, left Downing Street after Tory MPs blamed them for the disastrous Election result.
Now Ms Perrior, who resigned as Mrs May’s communications chief when the Election was called after a series of run-ins with Ms Hill and Mr Timothy, says Mrs May had declined a stylist for last November’s photoshoot and had wanted to bring her own clothes.
But just as Ms Perrior was preparing to go home the night before the shoot, she says Ms Hill ‘came storming down to my office and told me and my team that we’d failed once again in not preparing the PM for the interview the next day’, and that they had failed to buy ‘f****** hydrangeas’ to place in the foreground.
Ms Perrior adds: ‘Mumbling about how s*** we all were, I then overheard Hill on the phone to the designer Amanda Wakeley, begging her to send over a van-full of clothes the next morning for the PM to choose from. I was told by Hill that it was a big mistake to take the PM at her word with regards to her clothes – stupid me.’
Ms Perrior says No 10 aides only realised later how much the trousers cost: ‘This was a PR screwup that was wholly avoidable.
‘I didn’t even like the bloody trousers – they were the wrong kind of brown.’
Ms Hill has al ways been angered by journalists who highlighted her role in shaping Mrs May’s image, describing them as ‘sexist’.
Ms Perri or says that on another occasion she had to stop Ms Hill ‘going to join a bunch of journalists at the back of the plane on the way home from a foreign trip, dressed head to toe in flannelette pyjamas and two bottles of red wine down’.
She adds: ‘In hindsight, I should have bloody well let her go.’