Jennifer Arcuri has admitted she feels “betrayed” by Boris Johnson during a live TV interview in which she refused four times to say whether they had an affair.
The US businesswoman said she had not received any contact from the prime minister since a furore erupted over her receiving public money and access to foreign trade missions when Mr Johnson was London mayor.
Asked by Good Morning Britain presenter Susanna Reid whether she “feels betrayed”, Ms Arcuri replied: “Of course.” But she added: “I think Boris has enough on his plate right now ... I don’t need him right now. Britain needs him right now.”
She said stopped regularly speaking to Mr Johnson when she became pregnant at the end of 2016.
Ms Arcuri, giving her first televised interview over the scandal, said she met Mr Johnson at a business event in 2011 and found him “electrifying”. She claimed they later bonded over a “mutual interest in classical literature” and she saved his personal phone number under the “code name” of “Alexander the Great”.
Mr Johnson reportedly wrote a letter of reference for Ms Arcuri, then a 27-year-old student finishing a one-year business course in London, for a £100,000-a-year job running a government-funded technology company in 2012.
Her application was rejected but she went on to set up a series of companies which were awarded £126,000 in public money and accompanied Mr Johnson on three overseas trade trips.
Last month, the Greater London Authority referred the prime minister to the Independent Office for Police Conduct over allegations, first reported in The Sunday Times, that he granted favours to Ms Arcuri.
Ms Arcuri insisted she had “never, ever” received “favouritism” from Mr Johnson.
Asked about the extent of their relationship, she said he had visited her Shoreditch flat “five, 10, a handful” of times for professional meetings at her home office.
The technology entrepreneur is reported to have told friends she had a sexual relationship with the Conservative mayor, but she said on Good Morning Britain: “It’s really categorically no one’s business what private life we had or didn’t have.”
Pressed by Reid and co-presenter Piers Morgan on whether the pair had an “intimate relationship”, Ms Arcuri repeatedly refused to deny having an affair with Mr Johnson.
She told them: “Because the press have made me this objectified ex-model pole dancer, I am really not going to answer that question. I am not going to be putting myself in a position for you to weaponise my answer.”
Ms Arcuri said she and Mr Johnson had “tried having drinks out in public or having lunch” but “it just became too much of a mob show” so they met instead at her flat.
She said the prime minister had “asked me to show him a few things” on the pole-dancing pole in her home.
Ms Arcuri said she had suggested Mr Johnson try out the pole himself, but asked directly by Morgan if he had ever used it, she laughed and replied: “I’m never going to tell you that.”
Mr Johnson has denied a conflict of interest over his relationship with Ms Arcuri, although he refused to rule out claims of an affair.
John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, said Monday morning’s interview showed the prime minister was “unfit for office”.
He said: “Regardless of the exact nature of his relationship with Arcuri, it is clear that she and Boris Johnson were close, and that he misled the public when he said there was no interest to declare.”
