Dominic Cummings claims he considered a COUP to get rid of Boris Johnson

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Dominic Cummings has savaged Boris Johnson again during an hour-long bombshell interview.

The PM’s former chief aide unleashed his latest blizzard of complaints about his old boss during a chat with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg tonight.

He attacked him over his fitness to lead, his Covid policy, his wife Carrie and claimed he could have harmed the Queen by visiting at the start of the pandemic.

The 49-year-old claimed Mr Johnson admitted to him it was ‘ludicrous’ he had made it to the most powerful position in the country.

Mr Cummings also blasted the power Carrie has over the PM – who he lost a power struggle to last year – and said she wanted to ‘appoint clowns to certain key jobs’.

Meanwhile he took aim at the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and slammed it as ‘like a disaster movie’.

The Oxford-educated former aide claimed Mr Johnson wanted to visit the Queen at the start of the pandemic but he talked him out of it because it could kill her.

Despite the vicious attacks throughout the programme – called Dominic Cummings: The Interview – he said he was not speaking out for revenge.

He claimed he wanted people to think about how the country was governed and if power is distributed in the right way.

CARRIE AND THE COUP

The most explosive claim Mr Cummings made was against the Prime Minister’s wife Carrie, who he lost out to in a power struggle last year.

He said she wanted him gone as soon as Mr Johnson was elected in 2019 and wanted to replace him with ‘clowns’.

He said: ‘Carrie’s view was and is – the PM doesn’t have a plan and doesn’t’ know how Whitehall works. In 2019 her view was better that its Dom and Vote Leave team than civil service.

‘But as soon as election was won it was, why should it be Dom and Vote Leave team, why shouldn’t it be me.’

Mr Cunmings continued: ‘Literally immediately after the election it was already clear that this was a problem. We were having meetings in No 10 saying that Carrie all wants us gone.

‘The situation we found ourselves in is that the PM’s girlfriend wanted to get rid of us and appoint clowns to certain key jobs.

‘We actually have some pretty good judgement about who is competent and who isn’t competent.’

He said: ‘There was a whole official process gone through to hire an excellent young woman, and after months of this process happening it was all just thrown in the bin, and the person who the prime minister’s wanted to be appointed was just suddenly appointed.

‘Me and others said ”this is just a completely hopeless way for things to be run” and that led to a lot of tension.’

He also said he was looking to oust Boris Johnson as Prime Minister only weeks after helping him secure an 80-seat majority.

Mr Cummings, who left No 10 in the autumn after a power struggle, accused Mr Johnson of not having a plan and said he ‘doesn’t know how to be Prime Minister’.

He also laid bare the extent of the fractious relationship between former Vote Leave officials and Carrie only weeks after the landslide win.

‘Before even mid-January we were having meetings in Number 10 saying it’s clear that Carrie (Johnson) wants rid of all of us,’ said the former de facto chief of staff.

‘At that point we were already saying by the summer either we’ll all have gone from here or we’ll be in the process of trying to get rid of him and get someone else in as Prime Minister.’

Mr Cummings claimed that in 2019, ahead of the election, Mrs Johnson was happy to have Vote Leave officials working in Downing Street, but this later changed.

He said: ‘As soon as the election was won her view was, ‘why should it be Dominic and the Vote Leave team?’ Why shouldn’t it be me that’s pulling the strings?”

Ms Kuenssberg accused him if he saw himself as superior in his relationship with the Prime Minister.

He said: ‘I think that I had a plan and I was trying to get things done. He didn’t have a plan and didn’t have an agenda.

‘You know the Prime Minister’s only agenda is buy more trains, buy more buses, have more bikes and build the world’s most stupid tunnel to Ireland — that’s it.’

Earlier in the interview Mr Cummings admitted he thinks other people see him as ‘generally a nightmare’. 

BORIS THE MAN

Mr Cummings was also quick to continue to unleash his fury on his old boss the Prime Minister.

He said Mr Johnson thought it was ‘ludicrous’ he was PM after he took over in Downing Street and said he calls the Daily Telegraph his ‘real boss’.

The former chief adviser said the he also made the comment about his old university friend and fellow leader David Cameron’s time in office.

He claimed Mr Johnson has an ‘odd self awareness mode’ and ‘hopeless’ traits and he knows he should not be in his position in his latest bombshells about his old boss.

Mr Cummings said: ‘He’s a very complicated character. He’s unusual in a lot of politicians in having a sort of odd, self awareness mode.

‘He kind of knows in all sorts of ways that it’s ludicrous for him to be in that position.

‘He said that to me a few times before the referendum, he said that on the 24 June, the day after the referendum in 2016.’

He added the PM said: ‘It’s ludicrous that Dave [Cameron] was prime minister, it’s ludicrous that George [Osborne] wants to be prime minister. The whole thing’s ludicrous.’

In one of the more shocking allegations tonight, he claimed the PM still refers to the Daily Telegraph as his ‘real boss’ and said it was ‘hard to tell’ if he was joking.

Mr Cummings added the Prime Minister was being ‘driven round the bend’ by the idea in the media he was a puppet for Vote Leave bosses. 

COVID RESPONSE

In other parts of the interview the journalist pushed him on the government’s coronavirus response.

He claimed the Prime Minister thought Covid would be a passing ‘fad’ like Swine Flu was and added it was ‘like a disaster movie’.

He said: ‘It was like a disaster movie but it was real. even in the first week of march [BJ] said ‘business as usual’, he didn’t take it seriously. his view was that it was like swine flu and that he had seen these sort of scares before.’

Mr Cummings said the government’s plan of herd immunity was questioned by a ‘very, very smart physicist’.

He said they spoke to him ahead of lockdown and said: ‘Look it doesn’t seem this has been thought out, has any of this been properly checked?’

And he said they asked him if they could look into another solution.

BARNARD CASTLE

Mr Cummings was probed on the Barnard Castle fallout, which saw him issue a rare speech from Downing Street.

He had driven with his family from London to Durham to his parents’ home despite having Covid symptoms.

But he slammed the way the government decided to handle the incident as ‘extremely chaotic’.

 He said: ‘I’d had repeated security problems at my house going back to 2019, these problems had re-emerged… I’d said maybe I’d just move to my Dads farm in Durham.

‘My wife was kind of ill but not with all the right symptoms.

‘The situation was extremely chaotic… the plan was when I discussed it with the PM – he agreed we should just say nothing about it.

‘What then happened is that he suddenly changed his mind and said we can’t stick with the initial plan.

‘I said I’m not going into the security stuff and the whole thing turned into a whole mess.

‘Everything I said in the rose garden was true but i didn’t go into all the security concerns in the background.

‘There’s also no doubt that the way we handled the whole thing was wrong – what I should’ve done is resigned, or spoken to my family and said we’re just going to have to come clean about the whole thing.’

BREXIT

The interview also saw him grilled by the journalist about Brexit and the infamous NHS figure he had plonked on the side of a red bus.

He refused to apologise for it but said people are entitled to oppose Brexit and think it was a mistake.

He smirked when asked about the £350million figure on the Brexit bus after the journalist said it was ‘not the truth’.

He said: ‘We were using true figures… if the worst that can be said about a political campaign is that they used real figures but it needed more context – then you can say ‘vote leave has been more honest than any other political campaign’.’

He added: ‘I don’t think we won on false pretences – the arguments we made about the weaknesses, costs about the EU were vindicated.’

He also said he thought world events had justified Britain leaving the European Union.

Mr Cummings said: ‘I obviously think Brexit was a good thing. The way the world has worked out since 2016 has validated Vote Leave.’

But he was open to people criticising Brexit and says anyone who thinks they know the answer ‘is a complete idiot’.

He said: ‘I don’t know what sort of person you’d be if you didnt think Brexit was going to go down as a massive mixtake.’

BORIS AND THE QUEEN

Mr Cummings  also revealed Mr Johnson wanted to meet the Queen at the start of the pandemic despite signs Covid was spreading in Downing Street, it was claimed last night.

In a fresh assault on his ex-boss, he said he had to persuade the PM not to have his weekly audience with the monarch in case he gave her the fatal virus.

He told the BBC: ‘I said ”what are you doing?” and he said ”I’m going to see the Queen”, and I said, ”what on earth are you talking about, of course you can’t go and see the Queen”.

‘[The PM] said, ”ah, that’s what I do every Wednesday, sod this, I’m gonna go and see her”.’

The former chief adviser alleged he warned the PM that there were already people in No 10 who were isolating and told him: ‘You might have coronavirus.’

He added: ‘I just said, ”if you… give her coronavirus and she dies what are you gonna do, you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane”.

‘And he said, he basically just hadn’t thought it through, he said, ”yeah, holy s***, I can’t go”.’ 

Mr Cummings also claimed that Mr Johnson repeatedly said ‘we should never have done the first lockdown’. 

THE FUTURE OF POLITICS

Mr Cummings also weighed in on what he hopes will change in British politics in the futre.

He said the country should be ‘very, very aggressively’ trying to get ‘very rare people’ into power because they are ‘times 1,000 smarter than the norm’.

He said: ‘If you’re trying to do very hard things, especially in a pandemic… or the institutional mechanism for war, and dealing with terrorism, things like that, then my view is we should be very, very aggressively trying to get into position these very rare people who are times 100, times 1,000 smarter than the norm.’

He added one option for change would be a new party to take over from the current major opposition.

ON WHY HE IS SPEAKING OUT

BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg asked Mr Cummings how he thought he was seen by others.

He replied: ‘Generally as a nightmare.’

Mr Cummings was also asked about whether all his recent attacks on the government have been revenge for being booted out of No 10.

He said: ‘The reason I’m speaking out is I want people to be thinking about these questions: How are we governed? How is power actually exercised in No 10? What sort of things should be more transparent? How should these power structures be opened up?’

Ms Kuenssberg asked: ‘Does it have to be so personal?’

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s personal. It doesn’t matter if people are upset. All these MPs or ministers or officials or whoever … We need more difficult conversations in this country. More people upset.

‘A lot of people have a pop at me but you don’t see me crying about it.’

On whether he is still in contact with the PM, he added: ‘Last time I spoke to him was the Friday I left No 10.

‘He texted me a few days later asking if I’d speak to him and I said no. It doesn’t bother me one way or the other [if I speak to him again].’

In reply to Mr Cummings’ claims, Downing Street said: ‘Since the start of the pandemic, the prime minister has taken the necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice.

‘The government he leads has delivered the fastest vaccination rollout in Europe, saved millions of jobs through the furlough scheme and prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed through three national lockdowns.

‘The government is entirely focused on emerging cautiously from the pandemic and building back better.’ 

Brutal, disloyal and obsessive… My old friend Dom seems hellbent on destroying his former boss – whatever the cost

Commentary by Sarah Vine

Hard to imagine anyone quite as destructively attention-seeking as Prince Harry, who this week announced the publication of an ‘intimate’ memoir, no doubt detailing the full horror of growing up never having to worry about where the next penny was coming from or how to put food on the table (except, of course, when it’s the servants’ afternoon off).

And yet such a person does exist, and I’m afraid to say his name is Dominic Cummings, former adviser to the Prime Minister, now full-time thorn in Boris Johnson’s side.

I have known Dom on and off for many years, almost two decades, in fact. He is a man of great political passion and possesses a brilliant mind. Too brilliant, sometimes.

Intellectually, he can throw shade on almost everyone he encounters: you have to be seriously on the ball to keep up with him, even when he’s half a bottle of wine down at dinner.

If you don’t know him, his direct manner can sometimes be mistaken for aggression. It’s not, actually; but it’s true, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I have no doubt it was this, coupled with an unnerving and very unclubbable habit of telling people the truth about themselves, that made him such a Marmite figure at No.10 and which, ultimately, cost him his job.

David Cameron disliked him intensely, famously calling him a ‘career psychopath’, which I always sensed Dom took as something of a compliment (there was no love lost between those two men).

In fact, when Cameron was elected Prime Minister, he didn’t want Dom — who had worked hard in opposition alongside my husband to devise Cameron’s education strategy — to join the Department for Education.

At the time, I couldn’t really see why — but with hindsight, perhaps he had a point. Ultimately Dom’s absolute refusal — or inability — to contemplate even the slightest compromise has made him a very awkward cog to insert into the machine of government.

That said, Dom’s saving grace, I always felt, was that he stayed away from front-line politics, preferring to get his hands dirty in the engine-room of power and leave the shiny Sir Humphrey stuff to others. But something about the past few years, in the aftermath of Dom’s Brexit triumph and the ongoing psychodrama between him and the Prime Minister, seems to have changed all that.

Put it this way: the Dom of old would never have dreamt of doing a sit-down interview with the BBC, Meghan and Harry style. He would have considered it an act of spectacular idiocy.

But then power, or closeness to power (or even worse, loss of it), does funny things to people’s heads, and this Dom is a very different man from the one I knew.

He claims he is not motivated by a desire for revenge; but there’s no denying he seems hellbent on bringing down his former boss — whatever the cost.

Perhaps that’s because, as last night’s interview made crystal clear, he never really considered Johnson his boss in the first place, merely his chosen vessel in the pursuit of power.

Let’s face it, this is one political bromance that’s gone very sour indeed. In fact, there’s something a little alarming in the paranoid — even brutal — way Dom seems to obsess about the new Mrs Johnson, whom he claims supplanted him in the Prime Minister’s affections.

‘Before even mid-January we were having meetings in No. 10 saying it’s clear that Carrie wants rid of all of us,’ he tells Laura Kuenssberg in the interview.

‘At that point we were already saying by the summer either we’ll all have gone from here or we’ll be in the process of trying to get rid of him and get someone else in as Prime Minister.’

It all rather brings to mind that Taylor Swift song: ‘We used to have mad love/but now we’ve got bad blood’, the video for which involved Swift and her chums tearing chunks out of each other. This is, quite honestly, a similarly less-than-edifying spectacle for all parties involved. But it is also more than just a jilted adviser boiling the metaphorical bunny.

Dom has always had an anarchic edge to his character. Properly channelled, it gives him an electrifying edge. But tinged as it now seems to be with resentment, it’s an altogether more toxic kind of energy. He is not only trashing his former boss, he is also undermining the very institution of government — in much the same way that Harry’s recent outpourings devalue the monarchy.

Like Harry, Dom is not content to simply turn his back on No. 10 — he wants to burn it to the ground. And all for what? Because it’s hard to see how any of this benefits the nation, or leads us any closer to defeating Covid. It’s just one man and his ego, on the rampage.

Having watched the whole thing, perhaps the most damaging part of the interview is the revelation of a WhatsApp message thread from Boris to aides, sent on October 15 last year, in which he observed: ‘I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82-81 for men, 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 pc) and of those virtually all survive.’

He goes on. ‘And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff. Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate. There are max 3m in this country over 80. It shows we don’t go for nationwide lockdown.’

Dom is no fool. He knows the explosive nature of these messages, and he knows that, taken out of context, they appear cruel and callous. He also knows that in the current climate of blame across feverish social media platforms, they will play into the narrative of Johnson as a man who puts politics before people — indeed he said as much last night — and who will pursue a populist agenda at the cost of anything, even human life.

The reality, of course, is far more complex. Because unlike Dom, who as an adviser enjoyed all the trappings of power without any of the responsibility, the buck stops with Johnson. It is not only his job, but also his duty, to weigh up the pros and cons of his actions — even, yes, to the point of questioning the wisdom of sacrificing the interests of the vast majority to protect a small minority.

Far from being in denial about the situation, as Cummings implies, it seems to me the Prime Minister was facing down the realities of Covid, asking the cold, hard questions that needed asking. The real problem, from Dom’s point of view, was that he wasn’t doing as he was told any more.

Johnson’s job during the pandemic has meant he had been forced to make some very unpleasant calculations, of which the above is just one. He has had to balance the lives of those who are clinically vulnerable to Covid in the short term with those destined to die in the medium term because of untreated diseases such as cancer and heart disease (currently thought to be in the region of 150,000), with an NHS backlog now estimated at 13 million.

Then there are the long-term effects of lockdown on future generations, debt, the economy, people’s livelihoods, society, mental health and so on.

And he has to do so under extreme pressure, in the most hostile of circumstances and with vast amounts of conflicting and constantly changing data.

For Johnson, there were never any good solutions, only less bad ones. Whatever he did, whichever path he chose, some form of catastrophe was always inevitable; either way people were going to die, whether they be an 85-year-old in a care home or, like my friend whose delayed cancer diagnosis means she will probably not see Christmas, a mother in her early 50s.

Weighing up those choices is a hard process and it means exploring all the options and seeing the problem from all angles. You also have to be able to say the un- sayable, to contemplate the unthinkable, and trust that your mental modelling will not be taken out of context and used against you at a later date.

Dom may say, as he does, that Johnson was never suited to the job, and that ‘we only got him in there [note the narcissistic nature of that phrasing] because we had to solve a certain problem, not because he was the right person to be running the country’.

But in fact, I doubt whether anyone else would have done much better. Certainly not Theresa May, queen of indecision; and definitely not Jeremy Corbyn.

There is a wider issue here, too, one of personal conduct. Because if a Prime Minister facing the worst of situations can’t trust his closest aides, the very people — like Dom — who are supposed to help him carry this huge and frankly unfathomable burden of responsibility, what is he to do? In times of national and global crisis, those unlucky enough to find themselves holding the reins of power are forced to make choices no one should ever have to make. The closest analogy to this pandemic is World War II, in which thousands of able-bodied young people gave their lives to protect the freedom of the country as a whole.

The Prime Minister at the time, Winston Churchill, faced similar impossible choices, albeit in relation to troop deployment and military strategy. Some of them turned out to be the right ones. Others turned out to be huge mistakes which cost many lives. But desperate times require desperate measures, and sometimes — as we have seen with the vaccine rollout — the boldest risks do pay off. But you can’t take risks if you are constantly having to anticipate a potential witch-hunt.

In Churchill’s day, the ideas fizzing around in his head would have been debated in a bunker under Whitehall, or in memos fired off to colleagues. Today, a digital message dashed off on WhatsApp — so easy to save and expose later to damaging effect — is the incendiary equivalent.

What makes Dom’s revelations even more of a betrayal — and forces us to question his motives even further — is that in the end, as we all know, Johnson did ultimately choose to protect the older generation at the expense of the younger one. He did lock up the country to save a fraction of the population, and he did it at huge political cost.

He may not yet be paying the price, since the true after-effects of lockdown have barely begun to show; but in a few years’ time, when the financial realities bite, when the mental and physical toll starts to show, there will — as there was for Churchill, who lost the post-war election to Clement Attlee — be a reckoning. Until then, it seems the Domshells will continue to rain down.