How Boris groping claim fell apart

BORIS has loved well and not always wisely, but he’s not a groper. But that was the charge brought against him at the start of the 2019 Party Conference.

He recalls: ‘It was my first one as PM, when we were riding high and pulling away from Corbyn in the polls, and then this very weird story appeared.’

It was an allegation from political broadcaster Robert Peston’s partner, Charlotte Edwardes, [right, with Peston] that he had groped her at a lunch and simultaneously did the same to the female guest on the other side. ‘It was totally untrue,’ he told me, shaking his head as though still in disbelief.

I knew that. Boris is not the underhand, bullying type; that’s just not him. I remembered him being totally flabbergasted by the accusation, which almost ruined that first Conference of his as Prime Minister.

Why was this happening? Why would anyone say that? Why make it up and why at the start of the Conference?

The groping story ran for the first 24 hours of the event and it was toxic, threatening to derail everything. It became a sort of MeToo moment, the narrative so expertly managing to tar him as untrustworthy. It was all so tacky. He issued a statement calling it out as wrong – because it was.

Looking back, it’s clear what the master manipulators I have exposed as running the Party for their own interests were doing. Boris was building up a head of steam on the eve of an Election in which the Tories would win a stonking majority – the biggest for 40 years. So the story was engineered to take the air out of his tyres, to deflate him a little.

It was a vicious attempt to damage Boris – and the hand of Dominic Cummings, his Downing Street adviser, was all over it. But then it got out of control and Cummings panicked and went into reverse.

The second woman in the story also came out and said it wasn’t true – and that killed it stone dead. Left with only one source, the media backed off.

But Cummings was far from the only person out to get Boris.

Many parts of the media actively wanted him dead. Someone close to him was sitting next to the editor of the Financial Times at a dinner when he asked her: ‘So what are you up to? What’s your mission in life?’

To that she replied: ‘To bring down

Boris Johnson.’