Levi Johnston spills the beans on Sarah Palin’s VP campaign in Vanity Fair

It seems Levi Johnston, the self-confessed redneck and bumbling former boyfriend of Sarah Palin's teenage daughter, Bristol, has turned into an unlikely hitman, by giving a no-holds barred account of what happened behind the scenes of Palin's vice-presidential campaign.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Johnston does a hatchet job on Palin by claiming that his would-be mother-in-law planned to keep her daughter Bristol's pregnancy a secret. Palin, Johnston says, was worried about what an illegitimate grandchild would do to her political career, even before she became John McCain's presidential running-mate.

Seventeen-year-old Bristol, who Johnston dated for two-and-a-half years, became pregnant several months before Palin, then Governor of Alaska, was thrust into the international spotlight as the Republican VP candidate. In the Vanity Fair article, 'Me and Mrs Palin', Johnston says: "Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret - nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant."

When Palin was nominated, in late August - four months before Tripp's birth - it took three days for the McCain campaign to release a statement saying that Bristol was pregnant by her 18-year-old boyfriend.

Sarah Palin and her husband Todd also wanted to adopt the baby, Johnston claims. "Sarah kept mentioning this plan. She was nagging - she wouldn't give up. She would say, 'So, are you gonna let me adopt him?' We both kept telling her we were definitely not going to let her adopt the baby. I think Sarah wanted to make Bristol look good, and she didn't want people to know that her 17-year-old daughter was going to have a kid."

Johnston, who lived with the Palins for two months after the presidential election, also debunks Palin's carefully created image as devoted hockey mom, loving wife and sharpshooting moose hunter, telling the magazine that "there wasn’t much parenting" in the Republican candidate's house. "Sarah doesn't cook, Todd doesn't cook - the kids would do it all themselves: cook, clean, do the laundry, and get ready for school. Most of the time Bristol would help her youngest sister with her homework, and I'd barbecue chicken or steak on the grill."

A sneak preview of the October issue of Vanity Fair, which hits newstands in New York and Los Angeles today, also reveals how, after the election, a defeated Palin was ready to spurn elected office for money. Johnston says: "Sarah was sad for a while. She walked around the house pouting. I had assumed she was going to go back to her job as governor, but a week or two after she got back she started talking about how nice it would be to quit and write a book or do a show and make 'triple the money'. It was, to her, 'not as hard'.

"She would blatantly say, 'I want to just take this money and quit being governor.' She started to say it frequently, but she didn't know how to do it." ·