Parliament and the prime minister’s official residence are full of “nooks and crannies” providing politicians and staff with “ample opportunity” to have sex in, a former senior aide to Boris Johnson has said.
Cleo Watson recently published her first racy novel, which she said was inspired by her time working for Mr Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May, and has been billed as a mixture of Fifty Shades of Grey and House of Cards.
In one scene of the book, entitled Whips, Ms Watson writes about a “beleaguered prime minister” inviting her MPs to Chequers for a BBQ to get them away from the manic Westminster bubble.
While the fictional PM is delivering a “very serious speech” a couple upstairs are “in flagrante”, Ms Watson, said of the scene.
Speaking to Chopper’s Politics podcast, Ms Watson likened the story to when Ms May was trying to get her Brexit deal over the line in 2019, in what became known as the Chequers plan.
Ms May’s Brexit plans were vehemently opposed by Mr Johnson, who resigned as foreign secretary the previous year, urging his colleagues to “chuck Chequers” in favour of a “Super Canada”-style proposal.
“What occurred to me is that I have been to Chequers a couple of times and MPs do get invited,” Ms Watson said of the steamy she wrote about at the PM’s official residence in Buckinghamshire.
“There is essentially ample opportunity for this kind of stuff to happen.”
Ms Watson, 34, was deputy chief of staff to Mr Johnson when he was prime minister. Mr Cummings - who brought her into government after working on the 2016 Vote Leave campaign - was Mr Johnson’s chief of staff at the time.
She was often pictured arriving to work with Mr Cummings, with the pair commuting to work together from their homes in north London, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Ms Watson was sacked by Mr Johnson in November 2020 two weeks after Mr Cummings was shown the door following a power struggle between him and his team and Carrie Johnson, the former PM’s wife.
Ms Waton, speaking in July 2022 for the first time about her departure from Downing Street, compared her time there to being like the prime minister’s “nanny”.
“My role at No 10 sounds fancy, but a lot of the time I was much closer to being Boris’s nanny,” she said in an interview with Tatler magazine.
Describing her own sacking from No 10 in November 2020, Ms Watson claimed the prime minister told her in the Cabinet Room she reminded him of Mr Cummings.
“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”.
She added: “As so many in politics know, the end comes sooner or later – generally sooner, if you’re employed by this prime minister (although I suppose he’s had karma returned with interest recently).”
