Boris Johnson's former assistant describes her role in No 10 as being like the Prime Minister's 'nanny'

Cleo Watson, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Boris Johnson compared her role in Number 10 to that of the Prime Minister's 'nanny'.

In her first public comments since leaving Downing Street in 2020, the former aide also described how staff have created a 'puppy gate' to prevent Mr Johnson from leaving his office during his periods of self-isolation.

In an article for , Ms Watson, who was appointed to the government by Dominic Cummings after working on the 2016 Vote Leave campaign said: 'My role at No 10 seems fanciful, but most of the time I was much closer to being Boris' nanny.

Providing a In an unflattering description of her time at No 10, she said that when testing was limited to the start of the pandemic in 2020, she 'usually' took the Prime Minister's temperature to check if he had any symptoms of Covid.

"It's that time again, Prime Minister!" " I would say. Each time, never wanting to miss a good burlesque opportunity, he dutifully pretended to bend over,” she wrote.

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She said Mr Johnson had been repeatedly 'pinged' by the NHS Covid app which at the time required people to self-isolate for several days after coming into contact with someone who had tested positive for the virus.

The prime minister, she said, "insisted on working from his office downstairs while self-isolating ", adding: "Very soon this required the setting up of chairs as barriers in the doorway, because he couldn't help but cross the threshold of our next room to look over his shoulders at this on what people were working on (invariably in someone else's ready pair of glasses he found lying around).

Boris Johnson and Cleo Watson leave Downing Street in October 2020

'So the Prime Minister's Gate Puppy' was created. He knelt on the seats, his elbows propped on top, like a large, unruly golden retriever, howling for attention."

Describing his own sacking of No 10 in November 2020, Ms Watson claimed the Prime Minister told her in the Cabinet Room that she reminded him of Mr Cummings, who left government two weeks before.

"It's like a marriage is over , we shared our things and I 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".

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