Given the current political climate, being the author of a Westminster bonkbuster has its complications, as Cleo Watson has discovered.
A former No 10 aide to both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, she is about to publish her second novel to feature venal, sex-mad MPs being led astray by their libidos.
In both last year’s Whips and her new book Cleavage, there are multiple splayed buttocks and much sexo al desko. Everyone is either having affairs, dragging a Spad (special advisor) into a BBC cupboard for a fruity encounter before appearing on Politics Tonight or logging on to a Tory-centric porn website called Blue Balls and Bazoomas.
Cleo Watson is about to publish her second novel to feature venal, sex-mad MPs being led astray by their libidos
An MP is caught putting visits to an Amsterdam sex club on expenses. A former prime minister pleasures himself in the bath while watching a tape of Winston Churchill’s funeral and listening to Elgar’s Nimrod. Complete fiction, right? Right.
Yet Cleo’s problem — which is also our problem — is that when it comes to this current generation of sex maniacs and power-crazed poltroons, their sordid truth is often stranger than her pulpy fiction.
In Whips, she originally had a scene featuring an MP watching porn on his phone in the Commons. ‘Then that actually happened with Neil Parish,’ she says.
And no novelist craving credibility would have dared publish the former Tiverton and Honiton MP’s excuse — that he was looking at tractors online and got distracted.
‘Then I had a plotline with an MP sending d*** pics to bots and being honey-trapped — but I thought it was too obvious and unnecessarily tasteless, so I left it out,’ she says.
Enter William Wragg, MP for Hazel Grove in Greater Manchester, who last month admitted to being targeted on the dating app Grindr. After sending intimate photographs of himself, he was blackmailed into leaking the personal phone numbers of other MPs.
In a preposterous plot twist no one saw coming, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt went on television to congratulate Wragg on his ‘courageous’ confession after the matter became public. You couldn’t make it up! And Cleo wouldn’t dare.
‘If I had still been working at No 10, I would have been all over the Wragg stuff,’ she says. ‘I mean, Jesus. I guess you can’t stop him going on Grindr, but you can frame it in a better way.’
What frame could possibly make it look better? ‘Well, you could try to stop a minister from going in front of the cameras and saying, ‘Ooooh, he’s been so brave’ for a start. I get that Hunt wanted to be supportive, but what is going on?’
Not long ago, Cleo stalked the corridors of power, a dazzling figure in Alexander McQueen skirts and knee-high boots. At six feet tall, she was nicknamed The Gazelle, which was annoying, but she didn’t complain. ‘I tried not to dwell on it. I didn’t like it, but it could have been worse.’
She was also called the Dom Whisperer, for her ability to talk down her boss Dominic Cummings from the high ledge of his worst eruptions — no mean feat.
Her political career had begun when she was recruited by Cummings, a family friend, to work on the Vote Leave campaign.
‘He went to university with my sister. We called him Scruffy Dom,’ she says. She remembers that one of their mutual triumphs was advertising on porn sites for people to take part in Vote Leave surveys, figuring correctly that anonymous porny punters would be more inclined to be honest.
‘And there was a very funny moment when a Conservative MP rang us up and said, ‘Oh my God, have you seen that there are Vote Leave ads on such and such a porn site?’ When we asked him how he knew, there was a long pause.’
It is a scene she has reprised in Cleavage and, to be honest, I’m not sure if I find it ‘very funny’ or utterly tragic.
Cleo, now 35, was a deputy chief of staff and worked right at the heart of the Boris Johnson government from August 2019 to November 2020 — a tumultuous period that included the proroguing of Parliament, the landslide Tory election win, the Covid pandemic, Johnson’s hospitalisation and the events that would become known as Partygate, which still makes her sad.
In June 2020, Cleo was asked to put together a small gathering with food and drink for a 20-minute mini-jolly at No 10 on Johnson’s birthday. ‘Stupid, in retrospect,’ she says. The celebration resulted in Johnson, Carrie Symonds, Rishi Sunak and Watson all being given Covid fines.
‘So much of that period has been characterised by Partygate,’ she reflects today. ‘But we were in a constant storm; it was gruelling. Everyone was working so hard.
‘And we wanted to look back on it and be proud in a ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ kind of way. We wanted to say ‘I was right in the thick of things, I helped make decisions’ — but that is not how it turned out. It is so heartbreaking.’
Boris Johnson used to go around beating his chest and saying ‘Me Strong Like Bull’. But he was coughing a lot and struggling, says Cleo Watson
There are moments when it was like a fever dream, when they were barely coping, when one day she ate 13 sausages due to stress. ‘Not all in one go,’ she says in her own defence. Yet it was always going to end in tears. When Cummings’s star fell in November 2020, so did Cleo Watson’s. Shortly after sacking his chief adviser, Johnson sacked her, too — she reminded him too much of Cummings. He called her an ‘ugly old lamp’ left after a divorce, a totem of happier times. So Dom hired her, Boris fired her and it was all over.
‘You always need to be ready to leave Downing Street. Everyone knows you are not there for long,’ she says.
But Cleo is the kind of posh, well-connected young woman who will always bounce back from adversity. She grew up in a 17th-century farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons where her parents, Robin and Liza, ran their own business from home — an elite, residential English language school. She is one of five sisters (there is also one brother), who have all done well for themselves in one way or another. Older sister Bee also worked in politics, as Theresa May’s chief of staff, between 2006 and 2010. Molly was a journalist, but is now a business consultant; Nell was head girl at her boarding school; Flora designs decoupage gift items.
All attended Haberdashers’ Monmouth School for Girls, a £30,000-a-year boarding school where a former headmistress remembers them fondly as ‘bright, confident, sociable young women’. And in a manner of which Jane Austen would approve, all seem to have found excellent husbands on that desirable, peak-geek-hedge-funder-barrister-land-agent axis.
These days, The Gazelle has swapped the corridors of power for the dappled lanes of Wiltshire. She lives in a limestone cottage in a darling village, along with a bulldog called Hippo, a handsome barrister husband named Tom and their baby daughter, Tosca.
‘Tom was a choir boy at school. He is still very attached to the English choral tradition,’ she says, lightly explaining the middle-class equivalent of calling your daughter Beyonce or Rihanna.
‘How charming,’ I say, as little Tosca snuffles away in the corner, and Cleo brings coffee in Emma Bridgewater mugs, then pours milk from a pretty jug. Among the forest of new baby cards on the stone mantelpiece there is a congratulatory message from Dom, but nothing from Boris, whom she has not heard from since the day she left Downing Street.
Instead of the designer outfits she wore back then — which she bought secondhand on eBay — today she wears a pair of her husband’s old jeans, a bobbled Uniqlo cashmere sweater and a pair of trainers stained with cow pat. If you saw Cleo buying cheese in the village shop, with her country girl complexion and cheerful good manners, you’d never think she was one of those responsible for nursing the former prime minister back to health after his Covid scare.
‘Boris used to go around beating his chest and saying ‘Me Strong Like Bull’. But he was coughing a lot and struggling. I would try to get him to have healthy soups and broths instead of Coca-Cola. I don’t think he was even registered with a GP,’ says the woman who once described her high-flying political job as ‘being Boris’s nanny’.
Once, when Boris’s dog Dilyn fouled the carpet at Chequers, she told the prime minister to clean it up, and he did.
Cleo has a degree in politics and economics from Cardiff University. She was an intern on Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. Wasn’t ‘nannying’ Boris just a bit demeaning?
‘Carrie had just had a baby; Dom doesn’t have the nursing skill set. And I felt that if I wasn’t an epidemiologist or a data scientist, the most useful thing I could do was try to get this guy on an even keel, get him healthy and on the ball.’
Neither could her Wiltshire neighbours perhaps imagine that lovely Cleo returns to her flagstone-floored cottage, not to bake a cake or pot the begonias, but to tap out another torrid sex scene for one of her political potboilers. For example? ‘Look, I’m pretty short on time, so you can just shove it in dry if you want,’ pants a female character in Whips, and she is not talking about the laundry.
‘He sighs, rocking back on his haunches and wiping his mouth,’ Cleo writes in Cleavage about a character who has not, how can I put this, just enjoyed a freshly baked scone with his afternoon cup of tea.
Cleo had to watch so much online porn ‘for research purposes’ that she eventually had to get a new laptop because hers ‘just frazzled up’ under the strain. ‘But my sex scenes are very tongue-in-cheek,’ she says, no pun intended, ‘and sometimes people don’t get that.’
Her mother is completely appalled by Cleo’s book, but not in the way you might think. ‘My mother has strong views on my sex scenes because she thinks she could write much better ones than me, with much better sex,’ she says.
Cleo’s parents were one of the original couples featured in an updated version of The Joy Of Sex, the best-selling illustrated sex manual by British author Alex Comfort, first published in 1972. ‘They were interviewed about how they kept their romantic life going when they had six children,’ she says. ‘Mum is terribly proud of being included.’
During her years in politics, Cleo worked on the 2017 and 2019 election campaigns for May and Johnson respectively. She has put much of this insider knowledge into the plot of Cleavage, which centres around a beleaguered Tory government calling an election that no one thinks they will win — and distracting themselves with sex. Ring any bells?
Cleo insists she never personally encountered any predatory behaviour in Downing Street. Not even from Boris himself, despite being the sort of statuesque blonde that, in another life, would have been just his type.
‘Well, no. I’m a head taller than him for a start,’ she argues. ‘Yes, I am tall and blonde, but I’m not very sexy. I think that helps.
‘And Boris is mischaracterised as a sex pest person. He’s not like that. Well, I think I suspect if your lights are on, he might be like a moth to a flame, but he is not pushing down every door, if you see what I mean.
‘I never felt uncomfortable, and I also never got a hint of interest from him at all.’
There are any number of bright young things like her working at the heart of this Conservative government. One has to wonder, do any of them know what they are doing? Despite all her fancy titles — Head of the Prime Minister’s Priorities and Campaigns. Strategist. Campaigner. Deputy Chief of Staff — how important was she?
‘In reality, I was the duchess of pinboards,’ she says today. On one hand, she had the kind of emotional intelligence that was desperately needed in the wonk-rich Downing Street bunker.
When Dominic Cummings’s star fell in November 2020, so did Cleo Watson’s. Boris Johnson sacked her
She had the wit to make Boris stop and collect himself before rushing into Covid press conferences sounding breathless.
And she was prescient about the Opposition. ‘I sat in on those calls with Keir Starmer during Covid. He pretends to be robust now, but there was no input, no challenge, no nothing from him back then. All he would say was, ‘Thanks for telling me’, and that was it.’
Meanwhile, the timing of Cleo’s Cleavage election versus the real election is entirely accidental — but she is hoping it will be fortuitous for her book sales, even if she did greet the news with mixed emotions. ‘It was like hearing that an ex-boyfriend got married,’ she says. ‘Not a totally wonderful feeling, but I am glad I’m out of this one. It is going to be punishing. And I don’t see them turning it around.’
Her feelings of doom and gloom deepened when she watched the disastrous election launch, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak getting drenched in the rain outside Downing Street.
‘It was all so painful,’ she shudders. ‘He could have held an umbrella, but people might have said he looked like Mary Poppins. Now the narrative has been decided, which is that he is going to look silly. It doesn’t matter where he goes or what he does; he could do the coolest stunt in the world right now, but people would still call him a dweeb.’
Would you have sent him out in the rain?
‘I think,’ she says, ‘that I would have waited for a break in the weather.’
- Cleavage by Cleo Watson (Corsair, £20) is out on June 6.