Boris Johnson's former adviser recalls time she made PM pick up dog poo

A former adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson has opened up about what it was like working closely with him and revealed that she once made him pick his dog’s poo up.

In an article penned for Tatler magazine’s September issue, Cleo Watson has made some damning comments about Johnson as a boss.

In the piece, she recalled a meeting at Chequers where the PM and political advisors found themselves walking into a room and finding dog poo left by Johnson’s dog.

She wrote: “We made our way upstairs to be greeted by an appalling smell and what I took to be a small fig under the table.

“‘Oh dear,’ the PM said, looking at me expectantly, ‘Dilyn’s done a turd.’ I adopted the exasperated-teapot pose. ‘Well, you’d better pick it up then,’ I said. And he did.”

Watson worked in Downing Street as Johnson’s deputy chief of staff from 2019 to 2020 and described her time there as a lot like being the PM’s “nanny”.

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She described how, at the start of the pandemic before testing was widely available, she’d be tasked with taking the PMs temperature and responding to his regular “tempter tantrums”.

Other “nanny” duties involved regularly questioning Johnson about if he’d washed his hands, expressing concern about his hair “which made him look even more like one of those troll toys from the ’80s” and scolding him for making inappropriate jokes about Covid, such as referring to it as “Kung-Flu”.

Johnson fired Watson around two weeks after Dominic Cummings resigned and allegedly compared her to a lamp that he couldn’t bear to look at because it reminded him of a separation.

She wrote: “He [Johnson] said a lot of things, the most succinct being: ‘I can’t look at you anymore because it reminds me of Dom.

“‘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.’”

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