RICHARD KAY on intrigue and infidelity, casual affairs and sexual shenanigans at The Spectator – Daily Mail, Daily Mail

For a few eyebrow-raising weeks a decade and a half ago, its name was on everyone’s lips. The Spectator, on the surface a high-minded political magazine, had become known as The Sextator – a veritable hotbed of intrigue and infidelity, casual affairs and sexual shenanigans.

By the time the saucy storm had blown out, a Cabinet minister’s career had been upended, marriages were wrecked and it had provided the material for a laugh-out-loud farce of the trousers-down variety at aLondontheater – written by the publication’s own theater critics, no less.

Why does all this matter now? Because claims by a journalist that she had been groped byBoris Johnsonwhen he was editor of The Spectator have dominated the Conservative Party conference and sidetracked the Prime Minister’s attempts to set out an election strategy.

In her Sunday Times column, Charlotte Edwardes revealed that she had been grabbed beneath a dining table by the Prime Minister during a private lunch at the magazine. He had, she wrote, squeezed her thigh which made her ‘sit suddenly upright’.

Indeed when she later divulged this to the young woman who had been sitting on the other side of Mr Johnson, she too claimed to have been groped.

Yesterday as gropegate showed no sign of subsiding there was intense speculation about the identity of the second woman.

The magazine’s now commissioning editor Mary Wakefield was named on social media. But the baronet’s daughter – who happens to be married to Boris’s top adviser, the Downing Street Svengali Dominic Cummings, vehemently denied it was her.

Of course stories of wine-drenched lunches and lavish parties had been a staple of The Spectator long before Boris became editor in 1999.

But under previous editors such as the austere Charles Moore and Frank Johnson (no relation), the magazine maintained an almost High Church propriety.

‘All that changed when Boris attracted a lot of younger journalists whose entire lives revolved around the magazine. Basically, they had no homes or families to go to, ‘one former member of staff said.

A loucheness was now added to the editorial mix. It was a dangerous cocktail.

According to Miss Edwardes, the incident took place not long after Boris took over as editor at the magazine’s former offices in Doughty Street, central London. She was then 26.

Describing the moment, she writes: ‘Under the table, I feel Johnson’s hand on my thigh. 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. ‘

Yesterday the disclosure – denied by Boris – was shining unexpected light on the explosion of libido at the distinguished weekly under his editorship.

Even now, years later, there are those who say his legacy at the magazine remains more top shelf than top drawer.

Mr Johnson, who was married, had already been the focus of considerable tut-tutting over his on-off affair with one of the magazine’s columnists, Petronella Wyatt – known at that stage only to a close circle of Spectator colleagues and a few gossipy hacks – that had resulted in two terminated pregnancies.

But Boris wasn’t the only one. For weeks the goings-on at the magazine had been infinitely more exciting than anything its writers commented on at Westminster.

It all began with an astonishing disclosure in the now defunct News Of The World that Kimberly Fortier , The Spectator’s well-connected publisher, had been the alleged lover of the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett.

She had met Blunkett at a Spectator dinner and is famously said to have asked him: ‘I always wondered what it would be like to have sex with a blind man.’

Her own discomfort over the News Of The World revelation was compounded by the fact she had a two-year-old son by her husband, Stephen Quinn, the popular and respected publisher of British Vogue.

Within weeks it was revealed that the coquettish Los Angeles-born Miss Fortier had also been enjoying the attention of the magazine’s wine writer and chairman of Radio 4’s News Quiz Simon Hoggart.

Mr Hoggart, who died in 2014 and who had repeatedly used his column in The Guardian to deride the deceitful behavior of such flawed characters as Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken , found himself battling to save both his career and his 21 – year marriage.

Media speculation concerning Miss Fortier’s alleged indiscretions followed quickly on the heels of the muddled love life of The Spectator’s then associate editor, the pugnacious Rod Liddle.

Mr Liddle, a father of two and former editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, left his wife, Rachel Royce, for Alicia Monckton, 23, a pretty assistant on the magazine who was 21 years younger than him and who later became pregnant with his child.

The two, it has to be said, have now been very happily married for a long time.

Their affair even gave rise to a column in which Mr Liddle’s cuckolded wife took sweet revenge by detailing his failings as a husband.

By now no secrets at the Speccie were safe from exposure and it was just a matter of time before Boris’s affair with Petronella Wyatt, daughter of diarist and former Labor grandee Lord Wyatt of Weeford, was served up to a public eager for every lip-smacking detail.

Mr Johnson first became close to Petronella, then the magazine’s deputy editor, when he was made editor, but he moved her sideways as a columnist. She retained a precious desk on the second floor of the magazine’s offices; Johnson’s grander office was a floor below.

‘Petsy’, then 34, was a well-known figure in London in her own right: described perhaps unfairly as a ‘pouting socialite’.

Her love life has been equally colorful: known to admire older men, she once complained about being pursued by ‘a fat Arab who thinks he’s engaged to me’.

Is it any wonder that someone, somewhere would want to turn all this pulsating sexual tension into a stage play – or rather a farce?

That it should be the magazine’s own writers, Lloyd Evans and Toby Young, only added to the delicious mix. As Young memorably described it, the play Who’s The Daddy? was a ‘Ray Cooney-style farce… there’s lots of s ******* in cupboards.’

It presented Boris, or at least the actor playing him – naked but for a repulsive pair of silk tiger print boxers preparing to ravish an actress playing ‘Petsy’. Meanwhile ‘David Blunkett’ was seen groping ‘Kimberly’ and ‘Rod Liddle’ seducing a comely young secretary.

A comedy it may have been but it was also tragic. In the fallout David Blunkett lost his Cabinet job – though he later returned.

To his great credit Stephen Quinn stood by his wife. And Boris? Well, he famously tried to brazen it all out as ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’ and his marriage to Marina staggered on for a few more years before the couple recently agreed to divorce.

Domestic troubles still follow him. He has been plagued by claims that while Mayor of London he had an affair with businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri. Now he is accused of groping – an allegation he flatly denies.

Will someone write another play about it all? And what would his current girlfriend Carrie Symonds make of it?

Dominic Cummings’ wife denies she was the second woman ‘groped by Boris Johnson’: Mary Wakefield speaks out over rumors surrounding journalist Charlotte Edwardes’ account of under-table antics during lunch

By Glen Keogh for The Daily Mail

The wife of Boris Johnson’s top adviser yesterday denied that she was the second woman allegedly groped by him during a magazine lunch 20 years ago.

Sources had claimed that Mary Wakefield, who is married to Dominic Cummings, had her leg squeezed by Mr Johnson during a wine-fueled lunch at the office of The Spectator.

The allegations surfaced at the weekend in a newspaper column by journalist Charlotte Edwardes, 45.

She said the Prime Minister, then the newly-appointed editor of the political magazine, had ‘squeezed’ her th igh as they sat next to each other, ‘with enough inner flesh between his fingers to make me sit suddenly upright’.

Miss Edwardes was a young contributing journalist at the time of the 1999 incident. She said that afterwards she confided in a woman who had been sitting to the other side of Mr Johnson, who replied: ‘Oh God, he did exactly the same to me.’

Yesterday Miss Wakefield, who was also a young journalist at the time, issued a statement denying she was the second woman in question.

Now commissioning editor of The Spectator, she added that Mr Johnson had always been a ‘good boss ‘.

She said:’ I am not the woman referred to in Charlotte Edwardes’s column. Boris was a good boss and nothing like this ever happened to me. Nor has Charlotte, who I like and admire, ever discussed the incident with me. ‘

Miss Wakefield married Mr Cummings, the architect of the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum, in 2011 and the couple have a child.

Mr Cummings was appointed a special adviser to Downing Street in July. Questions over the Prime Minister’s private life have threatened to derail the Tory conference in Manchester.

Prior to the publication of Miss Edwardes’s column in The Sunday Times, Mr Johnson was dealing with allegations that he paid public money to an American entrepreneur with whom he was allegedly having an affair.

On Sunday, Downing Street described Miss Edwardes’s claims as ‘untrue’. But she later tweeted: ‘If the Prime Minister doesn’t recollect the incident then clearly I have a better memory than he does.’

Confronted with the groping allegation yesterday, Mr Johnson denied it, saying: ‘I think what the public want to hear is about what we are doing to level up and unite the country. ‘

The Prime Minister received the support of some senior Cabinet ministers yesterday, including Chancellor Sajid Javid, who said he had ‘full faith’ in him.

Mr Javid said he had spoken to Mr Johnson, who had assured him the allegations were ‘completely untrue’.

Conservative chairman James Cleverly told the BBC: ‘I know Boris Johnson very well, and if No 10 say it didn’t happen, I believe that. ‘ Tory Chief Whip Mark Spencer added: ‘If the Prime Minister says it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen.’

He added: ‘If I were a victim of some sort of assault, I would go to the police straight away.’

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he believed Miss Edwardes to be trustworthy, while ex-Tory minister Justine Greening said she found the allegations ‘deeply concerning’.

Miss Edwardes did not respond to a request for comment yesterday.

Meanwhile, Spectator journalist Toby Young, who also worked at the magazine during a series of sex scandals giving rise to the nickname ‘The Sextator’, played down the claims.

‘Back then at The Spectator, in those raucous days, people complained if Boris didn’t put his hand on their knee, ‘he said. ‘Times really have changed.’