Londoner's Diary
Political aide-turned-author Cleo Watson, pictured, has written another bonkbuster novel set in Westminster. Earlier this year, she published Whips, a raunchy tale inspired by her time as deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson.
Her second novel, Cleavage, is due next spring. “It’s a year on from where Whips left off,” Watson told us, “so there are some returning characters — plus new faces from Labour and the Lib Dems — but it is a standalone story.
“This time, there’s a general election ahead and everyone’s getting excited about juicy ballot boxes and chunky majorities.”
The title is another parliamentary pun — in political science a “cleavage” refers to divisions among voters.
And like Whips, it seems to be inspired by current events. “The Conservatives are miles behind in the polls, with Labour’s charismatic team scoring points left, right and centre.”
A hopeless situation, surely. But in Watson’s lightly fictionalised version of Westminster, the ailing Tories have a eureka moment. “With the help of a maverick team of data strategists, who have found a way to tap into the public’s deepest desires and taboos, scraping the internet for our most intimate searches, it may be that they can turn their fortunes around,” Watson teased.
Watson served as deputy chief of staff to Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2020. The former PM sacked her along with Dominic Cummings in November 2020.
In an article for The Spectator last week, Watson defended her former colleague Cummings following accusations of sexism. Messages disclosed to the inquiry showed that Cummings had referred to a female colleague, Helen MacNamara, as "that c***".
"While I think Dominic can be many things (insert some of his own well-chosen language here), in my experience he went out of his way to empower the women he worked alongside, promoting women into teams he built and calling out belittling behaviour against junior women," she wrote.
