Cleo Watson was the 6ft ‘mystery blonde’ spotted beside Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings during their Downing Street days. Now the former government aide has written a raucous satire inspired by real-life Westminster.
It was a humiliation to savour. Nothing befitted Boris Johnson’s political career like his blustery, would-be ingenious attempts before a parliamentary committee in March to bridge the gap between what as prime minister he had told the Commons about lockdown parties (there weren’t any) and the truth (prosecco, pizza and a child’s broken swing). Throughout No 10′s long party season, Cleo Watson was one of Johnson’s senior aides. Her work as his — her word — “nanny” was saintly. And yet Johnson fired her. I assume she followed his three-hour comeuppance as gleefully as anyone.
“I actually can’t listen to his voice any more,” Watson says, “although as I understand it, he said my name a couple of times. My husband was quite tempted to run over there and say, ‘Get my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth,’ Will Smith-style.”
Well, yes. A reprise of the Oscar slap might have been the only way that afternoon could have been topped. Does she, I ask over coffee in a bookshop in central London, hate Johnson? “No, I don’t feel like that. I just don’t want to think about him. Even thinking about it now, I feel that it was a once in a generation opportunity to try to do things differently — and it got frittered away.”
So who is Cleo Watson? Having boarded the Brexit campaign in 2016 she caught the eye of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s Rasputin. She first worked in No 10 for Theresa May, but under Johnson and Cummings rose to deputy chief of staff (indicative of the systems failure of the time, her title was shared with two others and there was no actual chief of staff). In those years in Downing Street she was unknown to the public, but when Sue Gray’s report on the Covid “gatherings” was published last year, she featured in a cameo. Watson was the aide who helped organise the party for Johnson’s 56th birthday — a cakegate conspirator.
Now, aged 34, she has written a book. Well, don’t they all, eventually? But it is not a kick-and-tell. She has alchemised her years in the heart of dross into comedy gold, a 400-page bonkbuster that has won the blessing of Jilly Cooper, despite its red stiletto-heeled cover ripping off that of her classic romp Rivals. Watson has called Whips the “Matt Hancock arse-grab of debut novels” because it is “truly cringe-worthy, but nonetheless gripping”. When pressed she calls it satire, and Whips is probably exactly what satire is: what happens when a writer’s tears turn to laughter, like dew point in reverse or something.
Watson did not keep a diary at No 10 because a lot of it would be, “I ate 13 sausages from the canteen today,” but all along she knew that she would one day write something set there, so she inhaled deeply of the toxicity. “You remember,” she says, “how moments feel, rather than exactly what was said. You remember the musty, slightly old-people’s-home smell of the cabinet room, for example, and how hot it feels when everybody is in there, crammed around the table.”
Into this milieu she inserted a plot of fornications up, down and against the corridors of power. It is an exaggeration, of course, but not so much of an exaggeration. With power, late nights and alcohol, weird things happen. “I had to take stuff out because they ended up happening in real life. There would have been an MP watching porn in the Commons. I obviously had to take that out.”
After Neil Parish was led astray while lusting after online tractors? “Exactly. And I had a storyline where the prime minister is temporarily incapacitated and the deputy takes over, and she is this crazy lady who ends up running the country off a cliff in a month.”
Sounds familiar.
“I even had a storyline where an MP disgraces himself, and his wife — soon to be ex-wife — takes over his seat. And that actually ended up happening.”
Indeed. Kate Griffiths in 2019 inherited the constituency of Burton from her barmaid-bothering ex, Andrew Griffiths.
She writes in a prologue of “MPs who struggled to get dates at university” now having “carbon copies of the girls who rejected them sitting in thigh-grabbing distance”. I suppose, I say, the prime exemplar is Matt Hancock, who seduced over long evenings at the Department of Health the student who fobbed him off with mere friendship at Oxford. “I’d forgotten about that. That is basically it on the nose, isn’t it?”
They say politics is showbiz for ugly people. If true, she was always a poor fit for it. At 6ft, Watson and her 4in shorter mentor, Cummings, were nicknamed “the gazelle and the pit pony”. Now, Cummings is widely regarded as less nice than he looks, but I battle to extract a bad word about him from Watson. I thought he was friendless? “I think he’s got more friends than people would expect. We live very near each other. I don’t know if you’ve met his wife [the journalist Mary Wakefield], but she’s one of the nicest people on the planet. He’s a good friend. He invokes this strong loyalty in people.”
Including in her? “I think so. He’s always been really kind to me. And I do care about him quite a lot. I suppose I think I could have done a better job at protecting him from himself a little bit in Downing Street.”
A genius? “Essentially, yes. But I think that’s quite an inconvenient thing to be. I think if you’re a purist, a very smart person, you get frustrated with some of the systems you’re working in, largely because they are based around people who are fallible.”
And fallibility, thy name was Boris Johnson. About him, over our next two hours together, she does not hold back.
Watson was brought up in a happy, bustling family near Hay-on-Wye where her parents ran a language school. Cleo was their fifth daughter and she has a younger brother. The six were perforce granted the gift of independence. She boarded weekly at a private school in Monmouth, failed to get into Oxford and went to Cardiff, where she enjoyed the rugby and the surfing and left with a 2:1 in politics and economics.
She says she did not stand out as a Tory at university because her politics were pragmatic rather than ideological. She has voted “for everybody at one point or another” and her husband, Tom Haggie, a barrister she married in 2018 ten months after they first met, “is certainly not” a Conservative.
Cardiff let her study in America for a year. At William & Mary college in Virginia she discovered she could also take an internship as long as she attended evening classes. Her internship was with Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign in Washington. “He’s just really cool,” she says. “Even the way he walks: he’s like this cool basketball player, on the prowl like a panther.” Years later, at Cop26 in Glasgow, he greeted her with, “How are you doing? Good to see you.”
Back in Britain, her first job was at a branding agency where she did nothing sexier than make infographics for the World Economic Forum. Then she ran into Cummings, a university friend of her sister Molly. “It was just after the 2015 election and he said, ‘There’s going to be a referendum on our EU membership. What do you think?’ and I was like, ‘Eh? I don’t have a particular view,’ like, I suspect, most people my age — 24, 25. He said, ‘Well, I’m going to run Leave. If you’re interested in campaigning’ — which I was — ‘then you should join one side or the other. And mine’s going to be potentially more interesting because we’re the underdogs.’ "
Working with Cummings was, she says, like playing chess with a grandmaster, but then she downplays her chess-playing: a lot of it was buying Dom’s lunch. On the fateful day Johnson holed up at home to work out which side of Brexit he was on, she left a Leave hat and umbrella on his doorstep. When the result was revealed, she felt a combination of, “Gosh, we’ve done it!” and, “What have we done?”
Soon, she was hired for Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 election campaign, working under May’s lieutenants Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. When May stumbled back into No 10, her political secretary, Stephen Parkinson, invited Watson to work in the PM’s political office. Watson thinks May was treated appallingly. “She’d get up, go to Brussels, come back and go to those 1922 Committee meetings where her MPs were briefing she’d better bring her own noose.” A devout bulldog owner, Watson campaigned for May to get a dog to help her relax. The PM thought in central London that would be cruel.
May announced her resignation in the early summer of 2019. When Johnson replaced her, Cummings rang Watson: “I’m going in. Do you want to come?”
So without having intended to be, she was back — back to see parliament illegally prorogued, Johnson deprive Remainer MPs of the whip, and then his 80-seat victory at the “Get Brexit Done” election. Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell’s new book, Johnson at 10, suggests Johnson’s conceit grew at this point. He considered the triumph his own rather than that of his strategist Cummings, and the two fell out. Watson does not entirely agree.
“I don’t know whether he thinks he won it alone, but I think he got very paranoid and cross about the narrative that he was Dom’s puppet. Pre the general election, he was so worried about being the shortest-serving prime minister in history that he was like, ‘Whatever, I don’t care.’ But after that it rankled a bit, and that’s when decisions were made over things like HS2 and Huawei. Dom said, ‘I think we should get rid of HS2 and obviously we should not have Huawei in our [5G] system,’ and Boris started to push back.”
Cummings, she adds, was never keen on the expression “levelling up”, which after Brexit came as close as anything to defining Johnson’s mission. “Levelling up is quite a dangerous term, because people come up with different interpretations of what that means. It’s fairly subjective.”
In March 2020 all agendas, vague or specific, were blown off the table by Covid. Watson caught the virus and so did Cummings who, with his wife and son, drove to Durham to isolate near his parents. The trip flouted Covid isolation rules, as did another in April when he drove to Barnard Castle “to test his eyesight”.
“The Barnard Castle thing I still don’t really get, that specific journey. But going up there at all, I actually do sympathise with a bit. He lives a couple of streets over from me in Islington [north London], and it was not unusual for him and his wife and their small child to turn up at my house late at night because people were putting smoke bombs through his letterbox and stuff. I think it was genuinely quite a threatening environment they were living in.”
When Cummings made his first public excuses, Watson went home to get the T-shirt addict a white shirt to wear for the press conference in the No 10 rose garden. His performance remains hard to watch. She thinks Cummings comes over better in podcasts than on television “because you can’t see him scowling and whatnot”.
In March, Johnson contracted Covid. Watson nursed him with Lemsip but on Sunday, April 5, he was taken to hospital. There was, she says, a sickening realisation that there was no protocol for providing the nation with an interim prime minister. Johnson, before entering intensive care, therefore had to anoint Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and first secretary of state. “It was very sobering,” she says, but her memory of Raab is that he was modest, serious and a good chairman of meetings, which suddenly ended on time. There was no bullying.
Before becoming infected, Johnson’s approach to his own health had been cavalier. Brandishing an oral digital thermometer, she would say she needed to take his temperature and the PM would bend over, Carry On Nurse-style. Back from the dead and back in Downing Street, he was ordered by Watson to drink vitamin juices rather than Diet Coke, exercise and catch his breath after climbing the Downing Street staircase. There were limits to her patience. “Dilyn’s done a turd,” Johnson told her regarding his dog’s contribution to the affairs of state. “Well, you’d better pick it up then,” she replied.
Did it strike her as comical or just depressing? “I think he responded well to a combination of firmness and coddling, like from a nanny. My skill set is not data or policy or comms. It’s dealing with people. And if having to nanny him along is the way the show stays on the road during a time of national crisis, then so be it.
“I didn’t find it particularly demeaning because I just thought this is how we get this guy moving, and someone’s got to. He obviously wasn’t responding well to being yelled at. A degree of coddling felt important. I don’t think it’s a fair characterisation of what it is to be a woman fairly high up in politics. I can’t believe for a second that Rishi Sunak’s female PPS [Elizabeth Perelman, his principal private secretary] has to nanny him, or that Starmer’s team need to do that.
“But one of the most difficult parts of my job in Downing Street was that I was a kind of gatekeeper. The idea is to stop people going in and out of his office all the time, partly so he can get on with some work and partly because you’d have a meeting and a decision would be made and then he would speak to somebody else. So there was quite a lot of, ‘Oh God, I’m absolutely desperate for the loo, but I can see someone lurking there…’ "
Someone who might change his mind? “Yes. And, of course, once he gets upstairs for the evening, he can get on the phone and call whoever he likes.”
On June 19, 2020, Carrie Symonds, the prime minister’s fiancée, asked Watson to organise a gathering with food, alcohol and soft drinks to wish the PM a happy birthday. Watson emailed Johnson’s PPS, Martin Reynolds, to say sandwiches and cake had been organised for 1pm in the cabinet room. She did not buy the food herself and nor, as far as she can remember, was there actually cake, but the 20-minute celebration resulted in Johnson, Rishi Sunak (his chancellor) and Watson all being fined by the Met.
“It’s one of those horrible moments where you wish you could just take it all back. I’ve got family who worked in A&E throughout Covid and I’m just so sorry and ashamed about it. I get to explain myself, but there were loads of civil servants who also got fined, who were working themselves to the bone in No 10 during Covid and it’s sad to me that partygate has clouded what they were doing. They were ringing individual hospitals to find out how many people had died that day. They were finding sites for mass graves and renting ice rinks for morgues and that kind of thing.”
But they may well have been working hard and then getting pissed on Fridays? “I think that’s true,” she says. “But ultimately they were in an environment where they felt they had permission to do this stuff. I don’t think, had Theresa May been prime minister, that it would have been going on, because the culture is set at the top.
“I mean, character is destiny, for sure. Someone was saying to me, ‘I think if partygate hadn’t come along or Covid hadn’t, he’d still be prime minister.’ And I was thinking, ‘Don’t you remember the CBI Peppa Pig speech?’ That was way before partygate. I mean, the reason he ended up ultimately resigning was because he chose to protect a sex pest [the deputy chief whip Chris Pincher].”
On Friday, November 13, 2020, Cummings and his ally Lee Cain, the head of comms, departed No 10. Watson was not immediately worried for her position. Over the weekend, however, a briefing war broke out. “It became pretty clear that, if I spoke up, he [Johnson] would look at me suspiciously. Then we had this conversation where it was sort of unclear if I was resigning or if he was firing me.”
He spoke to her of an “ugly old lamp” left over at the end of a marriage. “Every time I look at that lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You’re that lamp.” There was no leaving party, but when she visited the press team to say goodbye, Johnson — “unable to see a group of people and not orate” — delivered a “painful off-the-cuff speech”.
“The way he treated me was absolutely true to form, I think.”
And after all the turds she had, metaphorically, picked up for him.
“But that’s his way, isn’t it? He has a very high turnover of staff. He gave this sense of really caring about the person in front of him but we were just ‘people’ in the end. There is that bit in the Seldon book where he talks about firing Sajid Javid’s Treasury team. I was quite shocked to read it actually, but it’s helped me think about this stuff. Saj says, ‘I can’t get rid of my team,’ and Boris says, ‘They’re just people.’ I realise I was just people.”
Did she think Johnson’s days were numbered? “I didn’t really care either way. I just thought, ‘I know I don’t want to go back. I don’t feel invested at all.’ I didn’t quite see what his plan was.”
Whips stars three sassy, optimistic young women: a junior No 10 adviser, an investigative journalist and a campaigner for an endangered health unit who goes to London to work for her venal local MP. These women are not victims and by the end have achieved more than just survival. Watson is not, it seems to me, keen on the notion of female victimhood. Yet women in politics have been treated appallingly in the past few years: May, of course, but also her aide Fiona Hill, who Watson says was represented as a “bitch” by the press, while her associate Nick Timothy was “painted as a blue-sky-thinking maverick”. Carrie Johnson was nicknamed “Princess Nut Nut” (although Watson says she never heard Cummings call her that).
Worst of all was the fate of Allegra Stratton, the PM’s spokeswoman, who was later caught on video acknowledging the illegal parties and who tearfully resigned, only to be disowned by a “shocked” Johnson in the Commons. “At the same time she was apologising, he should have been apologising. It was months of lying. There was an opportunity to follow up ‘I’m shocked’ with, ‘This was a gross error of judgment. It happened on my watch. The buck stops with me. I ask your forgiveness.’ People might have thought, ‘OK.’ "
After leaving No 10, Watson worked with Stratton, not yet disgraced at the time, on Cop26 at 9 Downing Street. From the outside she perceived No 10 was “a lead-lined box”, almost impossible to penetrate. When she did, she found Johnson obsessed with logos, jingles and mascots rather than climate change negotiations. He regarded the summit, she thinks, as a chance to recapture his glory days as mayor of London at the 2012 Olympics.
“That’s fine, but we were also trying to balance Greta Thunberg and people coming from small island states who are drowning under water levels and people who are facing famine and floods. Him just doing, ‘Welcome to Cop!’ felt insensitive and wrong.”
Since the summit in November 2021, she has been writing. Having toiled in a government that lost the plot, writing her own appeals. A Whips sequel is on its way. She denies she is advising the prime minister’s wife, Akshata Murty. Our fun, lively conversation ends in regret at a landslide squandered and some self-recrimination. She could have done more, but perhaps even one “semi-dissenting voice” in the room was better than none.
So if Sir Keir were to ring the morning after the next election and offer her a job?
“I would say no. I want to write books for ever. I’m scratched down to the bone with politics.” And then she brightens. Whips is satire, and satire can breed anger and anger can breed change.
“This is hardly going to be the voice-of-my-generation manifesto, but it would be great if even one person who is reading it for fun on a deckchair this summer thinks, ‘F*** it! I could do this. I could do this better.’ "
I completely agree, for they could hardly do it worse.
Extract: Who else can say they have screwed their way through a prime ministerial address at Chequers?
Simon Daly MP is driving down the high street in his constituency. Tipperton’s an all right sort of place, he reasons, but nothing like Surrey, where he was brought up. At the top of his mind, as ever, is cash.
Like so many in his position, he finds the life of an MP to be a pricey one. There are the obvious things like rent and travel, which he and his colleagues are careful to expense, but there are all kinds of hidden costs like raffle tickets and coffee mornings. He seems to be constantly getting money out of ATMs to give to somebody to bathe in baked beans. And he can’t even complain about it! To the average person, an £80,000 salary, plus expenses, is extortionate. MPs crying about struggling to balance their Berry Bros account would hardly expect an outpouring of sympathy from the public. Still, there is no denying that compared with his time as a solicitor at a top London law firm, the pay is measly. He’d given it all up to give something back by becoming an MP — he didn’t realise it meant giving the shirt from his back.
Daly drums his fingers on the leather steering wheel of the Audi, thinking of the cheery air he now needs to put on all morning. He hates this kind of stuff, even if he knows he is good at it. So much of his life in his constituency is spent fobbing off people or stamping on inconvenient problems — local maternity wing closure, ugly solar panel planning applications, petty disputes of one kind or another. The list is endless and he is constantly hit with the uncomfortable reality that his need to be liked by everybody can’t be matched by the amount of money or time to go round.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Daly is on his way to Chequers. He eases his Audi into sixth gear and glides along the road. His wife, Susie, grips her door handle just a little tighter as they speed up to 90 miles per hour.
“Well, Suse,” Daly glances at his reflection in the rear-view mirror, “it is good of you to come today. I’m afraid it’s going to be terribly boring.” He wonders whether Susie is letting on that she knows more than he thinks. Since Daly won his seat six years ago, Susie has given up her work on a PhD in psychiatry and has lived full-time in his constituency. She has joined the WI, joined book clubs, helped at bake sales. She has manners and money (via her very generous — and now ennobled — father, who took a shine to Daly and shored up his political career). The perfect MP’s wife in every regard, which unfortunately for Daly includes a sensible and unsexy floral dress and cardigan.
Daly occasionally feels guilty about taking her for granted, but not often. He feels like a bit of cartilage between the bones of clingy women with whom he’s had ill-advised affairs and Susie, who is taking an increased interest in his life in Westminster. Just this morning, she expressed a hope of replacing Annie in his parliamentary office to spend some time with him in London. He truthfully said that Annie could do things that Susie can’t (notably, getting both of her feet behind her head).
Daly mentally gives himself a slap. If all goes well, he will be promoted to cabinet level soon under Eric Courtenay and he needs to keep his paws clean. To focus, he turns his mind to his task for the day: drip poison on the PM’s China trade deal ahead of next week’s vote. Nigel Jackson MP had called round the Courtiers — the name for the Courtenay hardcore supporters — and was very clear about what is needed: “Piss over everything. The P is for persuasion. We need the waverers to get off the fence. Make it clear we’re all screwed otherwise. I is for information. What needs to happen for each MP to move and to back Eric? What is their big dirty secret? S is for solid numbers. I need to know who’s a human and who’s a committed Courtier, who’s against us – and who’s just a useless bedwetter in the middle…”
“And what about the final S?”
“Jesus, Simon, who gives a shit about spelling?”
TWO HOURS LATER, Daley follows Millie, the wife of his colleague George whom he shares an office with in Westminster, up two flights of stairs to reach the Long Gallery. Millie bends her knee until her foot rests on a window seat and her skirt falls open.
“No knickers… Did you miss the dress code?” he whispers, kneeling before her.
Millie hears a murmur of approval from the crowd outside, and a moment later a patter of applause, but she has no idea what is being said. She takes the opportunity of the sound below to pull Daly up by his tie and push him back into a chair at a nearby desk.
“Calm down,” she whispers. Daly takes a deep breath, not least to try to suck his stomach in a bit, feeling more Lurpak than six-pack these days. Millie kisses him while she twists his tie round behind his head and knots it firmly to the back of the chair. There is another cheer from outside, which only spurs Daly on harder. Who else can say they have screwed their way through a prime ministerial address at Chequers?
Extracted from Whips by Cleo Watson, published by Corsair.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London