The comparison was made by Cleo Watson, a former special adviser to Johnson’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, in an article for Tatler magazine. Painting a picture of a beleaguered prime minister who was unable to undertake key duties and had to be “house-trained” when it came to adhering to Covid-19 protocols, Watson also described an incident in which political advisers gathered around a table during during a meeting at Checkers. Cleo Watson in the September issue of Tatler. Photography: Morgan Roberts, styled by Lydie Harrison. “We went upstairs to be greeted by a horrible smell and what I thought was a small fig under the table. “Oh, dear,” said the Prime Minister, looking at me expectantly, “Dillin made a move.” I adopted the exasperated teapot pose. “Well, you’d better take it then,” I said. And he did,” he recalls. Watson, who will release a novel next year, told how Johnson issued her own marching orders two weeks after Cummings left Downing Street in 2020, in the Cabinet Office conversation she believed “ it may have been familiar to many of the friends.’ She wrote that Johnson had told her: “I can’t look at you anymore because you remind me of Dom. It’s like a marriage has ended, we’ve separated our things and I’ve kept an ugly old lamp. But every time I look at this lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You are that lamp.” Dubbed the ‘Downing Street gazelle’, Watson added: ‘A lamp! At least one gazelle has a heartbeat. However, she obviously knows better than most what it feels like to have a marriage break up.” Contrary to reports, including a reference to senior civil servant Sue Gray’s full report on lockdown-breaking parties, Watson said she was leaving No 10 without a going away party. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST “What actually happened is we agreed to go our separate ways and I went to the press team to say goodbye. The Prime Minister, unable to look at a group of people and not speak, gave a painful, unexpected speech to a bewildered group of advisers, and I left shortly after,” he wrote.
