Boris Johnson’s former chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, has hit out at the ex PM and also criticised his wife Carrie, accusing her and her friends of ‘controlling Number 10’
Dominic Cummings has admitted for the first time he was responsible for Boris Johnson’s downfall as PM and admits he orchestrated it because Boris was “vandalising the country”.
Johnson’s former chief of staff also blasts Johnson’s wife Carrie and says it was unacceptable for Carrie and her friends to be “controlling Number 10 and with all the madness that entailed” while Johnson rattled around “being an idiot”. He brands current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch as a “bad joke”.
“Anyone serious who dealt with her before knew she was a complete useless dud. I think Kemi will be got rid of before too long. The Tories will have another spasm.”
Admitting he was the man behind exposing the Partygate scandal, Cummings tells the Sunday Times: “Yeah, I mean obviously,” he says. “I orchestrated it with a bunch of other people in Westminster who agreed with me that leaving him rattling around No 10 making a whole set of appalling decisions should be ended as soon as we could do.”
Describing his reasons he added: “We had a sort of responsibility for it, right? We won the 2019 election. We told people to vote for it and we put him in. And then if you put someone in and then they kind of go off the reservation and start actually vandalising the country, well, you’ve obviously got a responsibility to do something about it.”
Cummings who was sacked by Johnson from his role as de facto chief of staff in November 2020, a few months after being savaged by the media over his decision to drive to the northeast of England and stop at Barnard Castle while ill with Covid. He admits revenge may have been a factor: “Well, I mean, obviously there’s all kinds of personal and emotional aspects to all of these things. But the fundamental thing was we didn’t win the 2019 election so Boris could rattle around being an idiot with Carrie and her friends controlling No 10 and with all the madness that that entailed.
“So my view, and the view of the other people who helped me remove him, was that it’s just an unpleasant task but it’s a cleaning the sewers sort of role. No one wants to spend their time doing something like that, but you’ve got a responsibility to do it.
“The basic problem was … the fundamental thing about Boris was that it was all about him. It wasn’t about the project. So in 2019 he was prepared to act extremely radically and take on Whitehall. [But] after the election, he thought, ‘Oh right, I’ve won now, I’ve got four years as the king’.
“It’s not to do with the country,” he says. “It’s to do with his perception of himself and his own appetites. As he said to me the week I left, ‘I’m sure you’ll end up being proved right on my decisions. I’ve almost definitely f***ed it all up. But what’s the point of being the king if I can’t f*** everything up? What’s the point of me being the king if I’m just going to do what you tell me to do?’”
Cummings admits his nemesis was not Johnson but his wife, Carrie, to whom he attributes his downfall. “From her point of view, once we won the election that was it, we’d fulfilled the thing that she wanted, which was her and Boris are now there for four years.
“She knew Boris was obviously not going to be in charge of a lot of things that are happening in the government, because he’s not interested in it. So [she thought], ‘Why would I let Dom be the person in charge? Why shouldn’t it be me [Carrie] and my friends in charge?’ You can sort of see her logic.”
