British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has dismissed accusations that he squeezed the upper thigh of a leading British journalist during an event for Spectator magazine in 1999.
In a column in The Sunday Times, Edwardes, 45, described how at a lunch event lubricated with wine and cheer for Spectator magazine in 1999 took a turn toward the risqué when Johnson, then-editor of the magazine, placed his hand on her leg and gave her a “double squeeze.” She then found out that he had done the same thing to a woman on the other side of him during the same lunch.
“Under the table, I feel Johnson’s hand on my thigh,” Edwardes described in her inaugural column for The Sunday Times. “He gives it a squeeze. His hand is high up my leg and he has enough inner flesh beneath his fingers to make me sit suddenly upright. My mother always said: ‘Wear a badge to the cinema with which to stab the wandering hands.’ But this is work, so I am silent.”
Edwardes, who is divorced and the mother of children aged 13, 11, and 10, described that she informed another young woman seated near her of the unsolicited touching only to learn that she, too, had been the recipient of a double thigh squeeze by Johnson. The two women speculated about his motivation and circumstances. “We speculate: were the squeezes simultaneous? For balance? Was he hedging?” she recalls of the afternoon’s conversation.
In her column, meant to mark the second anniversary of the #MeToo movement, Edwardes wonders what, if anything, has changed in the two decades since her alleged encounter.
“It’s a reference point, I suppose,” she says. “I was able to say recently, to a work contact putting his hand on my knee during lunch: ‘Actually that’s illegal now, can you please stop?'” She goes on to wonder about Johnson’s personal life as the Prime Minister living at the famed 10 Downing Street. “I imagine, he man-sprawls the sofas, brushing crumbs from his tie, while, upstairs, his bedroom is a Tracey Emin installation,” she hazards. “Happy #MeToo anniversary, everyone.”
Critics of Johnson and his push to meet an Oct. 31 deadline for the United Kingdom to exit the European Union have characterized the allegations by Charlotte Edwardes against Johnson as having “cast a pall over the Conservative party conference.”
Others felt that the story had little effect on the public perception of Johnson and his agenda. “Humbug!” wrote Allison Pearson, a columnist for The Telegraph. “The media class, grooming each other like gorillas on expenses in the fancy London Lounge here in Manchester, may like to claim that “Gropegate” has harmed the Prime Minister. Normal people couldn’t give a monkey’s.”
Pearson pointed out that Edwards waited 20 years to make her claim of impropriety against Johnson, 55, and chose to reveal the story as she launched a new magazine column. “Such fortuitous timing!” Pearson said. “One might almost think it had been designed to inflict maximum damage on the PM and to feed the narrative, the latest line of attack on him, that Boris has ‘a women problem.'”
Johnson categorically denied the accusations levied by Edwards. “All I know is that it’s not true,” he said in an interview last week. “It is not true for all sorts of reasons.”
Edwards, the daughter of a retired Royal Navy commodore, is the longtime girlfriend of Robert Peston, 59, political editor of ITV, who is a widower. Peston is a critic of Johnson who Pearson described as someone “who tweets with apparent enthusiasm about a possible ‘government of national unity’ to take over from the actual government — you know, the one elected by the British people.”
“Many Leave voters I know are so incensed by this shameless Boris-bashing that they simply won’t watch or listen to the news any more,” Pearson said of the increasingly agitated base of Johnson and Brexit supporters. “And who can blame them for the Great Switch-Off when the head of Channel 4 News gives a speech saying Boris is a liar and that her programme would be saying so? So much for impartiality!”
Johnson is in the midst of divorce proceedings with his second wife Marina Wheeler, with whom he has four children: Lara Lettice Johnson, 26, Milo Arthur Johnson, 24, Cassia Peaches Johnson, 22, and Theodore Apollo Johnson, 20. Johnson also has a daughter Stephanie, 10, with Helen Macintyre, an art adviser with whom he had an affair. During court proceedings in 2013 there were claims he had a sixth — and second illegitimate — child.
He had a four-year affair with journalist Petronalla Wyatt, news of which broke in 2004. She said afterwards that she had undergone an abortion and suffered a miscarriage. John met his first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who once appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine, when they were Oxford students in 1987. They divorced in 1993 after he was rumored to have cheated on her with Wheeler.
