One of two women who accused a former Tory MP of sexual assault has described her fear during an alleged incident at his home in which he allegedly groped and pursued her before she locked herself in a room. Giving evidence via video link at the trial of the former MP, Charlie Elphicke, at Southwark crown court, the woman, who cried at one point, described the alleged events in 2007 at his London home as “embarrassing, odd and scary”. Elphicke, the MP for the Kent constituency of Dover and Deal from 2010 to 2019, denies three counts of sexual assault. He lost the Tory whip in 2017 when the allegations were referred to the police, but was reinstated in 2018 before a vote of confidence in Theresa May, then prime minister. He did not stand at the 2019 general election, at which the seat was held for the Conservatives by his wife, Natalie. On the second day of Elphicke’s trial, the woman, who alleges that he assaulted her in 2007 at his family’s home in London, described how they had been chatting and sharing a bottle of wine on an evening when Natalie was away and his children were asleep upstairs. As they sat on a sofa, the woman said she was taken by surprise when he suddenly tried to kiss her and pushed her back into “a sprawling position” before putting his knee between her legs and groping her breast. The woman, in her 20s at the time, recalled shouting “no” or “get off” and told the court: “I pushed him with what I would say was a lot of force and I just ran away, basically. My adrenaline was going and I just had to get out of there.” Elphicke pursued her, she alleged, repeating, “I’m a naughty Tory” in a singsong voice and touching her bottom before she locked herself in a downstairs room. “I was really worried about what he would do if he came back downstairs. He was knocking on the door,” she told the court. Under cross-examination, she rejected suggestions by Elphicke’s defence barrister that she had given a false account and had come up with the “I’m a naughty Tory” claim following news coverage in 2017 of a so-called “naughty list” of Conservative MPs. “Pretty much everyone in the country was talking about the list of naughty Tories and you knew that Mr Elphicke’s name was on the list,” said Ian Winter QC, who also put it to her that this prompted her to try to sell her story to the Daily Mirror. However, Winter said the newspaper had pulled the plug on the story days later after the Welsh government minister Carl Sargeant took his own life following his dismissal amid allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour. The woman disagreed, insisting that she backed out of the story, for which Winter said she stood to earn £30,000. “I wanted to expose him. Then I reflected and decided to go to the police,” she said. Winter also focused on other details of her account, putting to her that his client had “genuinely enjoyed sharing a bottle of wine” with her on the night of the alleged assault, and that she did not go to the police at the time because there was a “misunderstanding” about what happened. “The true reason [for not informing the police] is you knew in 2007 that Mr Elphicke thought it was a perfectly pleasant evening,” said the lawyer. The woman told him: “I don’t agree with you, sorry.” Winter later put it to her that the pair had been “getting on OK” as they sat on the sofa and had been placing chocolate stars in each other’s mouths “in a perfectly friendly way”. She said she could not recall this and denied his suggestion that Elphicke had “immediately stopped” kissing her when she asked him. Elphicke also faces allegations of two sexual assaults in 2016 against another woman, who was working in Westminster at the time. The trial continues.