Nannygate: Carrie and Boris Johnson’s battle with their former nanny

Michael Corleone’s line about his enemies in The Godfather Part III—”Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—seems to apply to Boris Johnson as well. But in the former British prime minister’s case, usually he just jumps back into the pool on his own, generally because of scandals as uninspiring as the battle he and his wife Carrie are currently waging against their ex-nanny.

In recent weeks, Johnson, who is always eager to return to the political frontlines —and to take revenge on Rishi Sunak, whom he still considers to be the main cause of his downfall— had taken a stand against the two main political issues in the UK public debate: the current Prime Minister’s backtracking on his promises to tackle climate change and the planned cuts to the high-speed rail plans in the north of the country, Johnson’s major project. But all the British tabloids are talking about is nannygate, the battle Theresa Dawes, 59, is waging against the Johnsons. The nanny alleges that she was arbitrarily and unfairly fired just two weeks after she was hired to take care of little Frank Alfred Odysseus, the couple’s third child who was born on July 5.

Dawes says that, after just three days on the job, Carrie Johnson returned home from the hospital, called an Uber, and told her she had 15 minutes to pack her bag and leave the house. The former nanny shared the story with The Sunday Mirror and asserted that her firing was a rude awakening. On the day the little boy was born, Johnson returned home euphoric and invited the nanny to “wet the head” of the newborn. “It was a lovely, hot day and when Boris got home he went out on to the terrace and opened a bottle of wine,” Dawes told the tabloid. “He asked me to join him, to toast baby Frank and to give me a report on Carrie and the baby, how they were doing, when they were coming home, that sort of thing,” the Johnsons’ former employee explained.

But Carrie’s mother saw the two of them enjoying that wine and allegedly told her daughter. The next day, when the former Conservative Party communications adviser returned home from the hospital, looking distinctly irritated, she walked past without so much as saying hello to Dawes and asked where her mother was, before heading to the children’s room.

The former nanny says that she “was gobsmacked” when Johnson’s wife told her to leave. There was something twisted about Carrie’s reason. According to Dawes, she was still upset because the same nanny had told her, two weeks earlier during the job interview, that the couple she had worked for previously had celebrated Johnson’s resignation over the Partygate scandal, the banned parties held at Downing Street during quarantine. “I went to find Boris in the kitchen. I said, ‘I’m so sorry if I offended you.’ He didn’t know what to do. He said, ‘I don’t know what to say, she’s hormonal, she’s just had a baby, it’s out of my control.’” Dawes claims that Carrie’s reason was simply an excuse, and that what really irritated her was the idea that her husband was already having a drink alone with the new nanny.

The couple, who were married in a surprise wedding in May 2021, have denied all of Dawes’s allegations through a spokesman. They accuse the nanny of trying to squeeze more money out of the firing. The contract was for three months, Dawes says, and she has threatened them with legal action to claim full payment for that period plus damages. “It is disappointing to see someone who sought a position of trust abuse it to create a completely false story for financial gain,” the Johnsons said.

Like all other Brits, Dawes is aware that, after leaving Downing Street, Johnson has earned hundreds of thousands of pounds simply for giving speeches. And it is striking that the new scandal has hit the press at a time when the former prime minister is once again coming out to lambast the Sunak government. But his decades of wandering and adventures mean that, regardless of any possible political maneuvering in this new row, nobody doubts that the former prime minister’s comments to his ex-nanny in the kitchen sound 100 percent like Johnson.

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