A FORMER aide to Boris Johnson had to be his “nanny” during the coronavirus lockdown – which included erecting a puppy gate which he howled like a dog from and scolding the Prime Minister for “Kung-Flu” and “Aye! Corona” jokes.
Cleo Watson, who was recruited to Number 10 by Dominic Cummings, gave a glimpse into her time with Johnson in a piece for Tatler’s September issue.
She revealed details of a scrapped “Winston Churchill” photoshoot with Johnson and said the Prime Minister required “house training”.
Explaining her position in Downing Street, Watson wrote: “My role at No 10 sounds fancy, but a lot of the time I was much closer to being Boris’s nanny.”
The staffer was put in charge of taking Johnson’s temperature at the start of lockdown.
She said: “This was generally done by me, towering over him (with or without heels – I generally found it useful to be physically intimidating in the role of nanny), 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.”
The teapot stance was also adopted when requiring Johnson to clean up after a dog.
Watson 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."
Taking tests was not the only issue Johnson had with coronavirus, however, as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was incapable of isolating.
Staffers set up chairs as a barrier to an adjoining room to Johnson’s, with Watson writing: “He’d peer over shoulders at what people were working on (invariably in a pair of someone else’s reading glasses he’d found lying around). 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.”
Watson pointed to “frequent scolding about making gags such as ‘Kung-Flu’ and ‘Aye! Corona!’” and keeping Johnson up-to-date on washing his hands as further evidence of the nannying.
Watson also revealed details of a scrapped photoshoot for VE day, with Downing Street decked out in Union Jacks.
A bulldog was brought in for the photo, which was taken in front of a portrait of Winston Churchill.
Watson said: “Very patriotic, but the common chord between the three subjects wasn’t exactly a quintessential Britishness – it was a near-identical hunched, potato-sack posture and a jowly, grumpy tolerance of the whole blasted enterprise. We all agreed it was too much.”
The aide, who studied at Cardiff University, worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign during a year in America before joining the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit in 2015.
She then took up a role in Theresa May’s office, before Cummings recruited her to Downing Street.
After Cummings’s acrimonious exit from No 10, Johnson dismissed Watson.
She claims he 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. But every time I look at that lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You’re that lamp.”
Watson's article will appear in Tatler's September issue, available from August 4.
She has written a new book, titled Whips!, which will be published by Corsair in May 2023.
