In her new memoir, Obama aide Alyssa Mastromonaco tells the story of how she managed to pilfer an item from Buckingham Palace.
In the book, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, Mastromonaco fesses up to the theft during her visit to London with the president in 2011 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee celebration of Queen Elizabeth II.
As they were heading back to Washington, D.C., having said goodbye to the Queen and Prince Philip, Obama commented on Mastromonaco’s decision to wear jeans to meet the British sovereign.
Mastromonaco, Obama’s deputy chief of staff, writes in the book, which is due out later this month: “POTUS turned to me, looked down, and said: ‘Jeans?’
“I’m sorry!” I replied. “I didn’t know!’
He looked me up and down again. “What is that?”
“It was the issue of Tatler magazine that I had accidentally stolen from Buckingham Palace when I was too preoccupied with hustling out to the helicopter to remember to put it back.”
Rather than return the British society bible to Buckingham Palace, Mastromonaco writes: “That issue of Tatler is in a box somewhere in Manhattan Mini Storage. I’m pretty sure Lily Collins was on the cover.”
Elsewhere in the book, as reported in Page Six, we learn that Obama tried unsuccessfully to set Mastromonaco up with Hollywood producer and Democrat donor Lawrence Bender. She also chronicles suffering from irritable bowel syndrome while visiting the Pope.
She writes of her IBS condition: “I once had to have Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, watch the bathroom door for me at Hamid Karzai’s palace while two Afghan guards played cards and smoked on the other side of it.”
Mastromonaco, now an executive at A+E Networks, hasn’t been shy about calling out the Trump administration on Twitter for demeaning the presidency.
