- Charlotte Edwardes, a British journalist, said that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had groped her thigh at a work lunch around the year 2000.
- Edwardes was a contributor at the time to The Spectator, the magazine of which Johnson was then editor.
- Recalling the event in a column for The Sunday Times, Edwardes wrote: "Under the table, I feel Johnson's hand on my thigh. He gives it a squeeze. His hand is high up my leg."
- A Downing Street spokeswoman was not immediately able to comment.
A British journalist has accused Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, of groping her inner thigh while sitting next to her at a lunch in his previous career as a magazine editor.
Charlotte Edwardes, the assistant editor of The Sunday Times, wrote in a column for the newspaper that Johnson put his hand on her leg during his time as the editor of The Spectator, a renowned British political magazine.
A spokeswoman for 10 Downing Street was not immediately able to comment.
At the time Edwardes was a newspaper reporter who also wrote occasional pieces for the magazine, which Johnson ran, making him effectively her boss.
I wrote about the time Boris Johnson squeezed my thigh over lunch - while doing the same thing to the woman sitting on his other side #DoubleThighSqueezer @TheSTStyle @thesundaytimes https://t.co/AzUANcRYJx
— Charlotte Edwardes (@chedwardes) September 29, 2019
She said her usual reaction would have been to confront Johnson, but that she stayed silent because it was a work situation.
Edwardes did not give a precise date for the allegation, which she said took place at a routine, drunken lunch "in the late 1990s/early 2000s." Johnson was editor from 1999 to 2005.
She characterized it as a drunken affair, writing: "The mood is of the time: louche, loud, risqué. Wine is poured; wine is drunk."
Edwardes would have been in her late twenties or early thirties at the time. Johnson, she said, was in his late thirties
Here is how she described the moment:
"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.
"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 said that a second woman was seated on the other side of Johnson, and told her afterwards that the same thing had happened to her.
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