Ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he broke his own Covid guidelines because he "fell in love" with his aide.
The former Cabinet minister was forced to resign last year after leaked CCTV showed him in a clinch with adviser Gina Coladangelo in his Whitehall office.
The footage was taken on May 6 2021, when indoor social gatherings of people from different households were banned under law and guidance urged people to stay two metres apart and avoid "face to face contact".
Mr Hancock initially clung onto his job and Boris Johnson was criticised for failing to sack him.
But the following day he resigned after admitting he had broken his own Covid guidance.
In a lengthy interview with the Diary of a CEO podcast, Mr Hancock said he "fell in love" and "it all happened quite quickly" - but insisted he did not break the law.
Clad in a navy polo neck, the senior Tory spoke at length about the affair, which brought an abrupt end to his Cabinet career.
He said: "We fell in love and that's something that was completely outside of my control.
"Of course I regret the pain that's caused and the very, very public nature - anybody who has been through this knows how difficult it is, how painful it is."
Mr Hancock said he fell in love with Ms Coladangelo - whom he has known since his student days - while they were working together at the Department for Health and Social Care.
He left his wife and children to start a relationship with Ms Coladangelo, who was also married with children.
The West Suffolk MP said: "It all happened quite quickly, It actually happened after the rules were lifted, but the guidance was still in place.
"So I’m not trying to claim that, I hold no bitterness about this because I broke the rules, I fess up, I broke the guidance.”
He went on: “I resigned because I broke the social distancing guidelines by then. They weren’t actually rules. They weren’t the law. But that’s not the point.
"The point is they were the guidelines that I’d been proposing. And that happened because I fell in love with somebody.”
Mr Hancock admitted to breaking his own guidance when he dramatically quit his Cabinet post last year.
In his letter to Boris Johnson at the time, he wrote: "We have worked so hard as a country to fight the pandemic. The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.
"I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need be with my children at this time."
In a video posted on Twitter at the time, Mr Hancock admitted he had to go, saying: "I understand the enormous sacrifices that everybody in this country has made, you have made.
"And those of us who make these rules have got to stick by them and that's why I've got to resign."
Mr Hancock was also grilled on his handling of the pandemic - and said he would still have taken the job even if he'd known Covid was coming.
“When the really bad stuff happens and you’re in the job, you got to stand up and be counted,” he said.
The senior Tory admitted ministers knew that some of the measures they took during the pandemic were "very damaging".
“The costs of action are huge, the cost of inaction are also huge,” he said.
“So we knew when we were sitting around the cabinet table making these decisions that the balance between these two was an enormous unknown.
"So with an unprecedented virus with very little data, we were essentially doing these things that we knew we're going to be very damaging.”
