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Louise Thomas
Editor
Boris Johnson has branded his former chief of staff Dominic Cummings as “weird” and compared him to a “homicidal robot” as he blamed him for his downfall as prime minister.
In his new autobiography Unleashed, the Mr Johnson charted the collapse of his relationship with Cummings from the high point of them working to win the EU referendum in 2016.
But he has alleged that Cummings lack of gratitude for his efforts to defend him over potentially breaking lockdown rules with an infamous trip to Barnard Castle in 2020 led to the former chief of staff using Partygate as a form of revenge.
In his new book Johnson recounts hearing Cummings in an interview for the BBC admitting that he had been conspiring to bring him down as prime minister from early January 2020 just weeks after the massive election victory.
Johnson noted: “I mean WTF?”
“You might have thought that the honourable thiing to do would have been to resign, if that was how he really felt,” he added.
He suggested that Cummings may have been like the infamous Shakespearean character Iago pursuing “the motive-hunting of the motiveless malignant”. He also targeted his former director of communications Lee Cain.
But Johnson concluded that the briefings against himself, his wife Carrie, dog Dilyn and the government as a whole which led to the Partygate scandal may have been prompted by the Barnard Castle affair in early May 2020.
At that point Cummings had contracted Covid and fled from London with his family to the north east when the rest of the country was in lockdown. He infamously then took a trip to Barnard Castle claiming he needed to check his eyesight with a practice drive before returning to London.
Johnson noted: “I know, I know: it sounds pretty thin, put like that but at the time I really believed it.”
He had a “blazing row” with former colleague and friend Will Walden who urged him to sack Cummings.
But Johnson said he retorted: “The whole thing is a put up job. It’s just a load of lefty journalists who want payback for Brexit.”
He then forced Cummings to give a press conference in the Downing Street garden ahead of the daily press briefing. Johnson claimed Cummings’ “truculent” demeanour meant “he failed to capture much sympathy”.
The former prime minister added: “I suspect, looking back, that he didn’t thank me for trying heroically to defend him, as I had... I reckon the so-called Partygate affair that he and Lee Cain were to orchestrate was a kind of payback for the indignities he believed he had suffered over Barnard Castle.”
He described both Cummings and Cain as “great colleagues and friends” during the vote Leave campaign and claimed Cummings role in running the referendum operation was “pivotal” and claimed he was “sad” to sack them.
The problems accelerated when he discovered that a story about his dog Dilyn had come from Cummings and Cain.
“I had discovered much later, by a circuitous route, that Cummings had lied to my face about the attacks on Dilyn. He WAS guilty...Perhaps he was somehow nervous of Dilyn, and his doggy nose for the truth.”
He then said he discovered that Cain and Cummings were behind the “chatty rat” briefings and claimed “their behaviour got weirder and weirder”.
Johnson makes it clear that the final straw was a “spiteful briefing” against adviser Kate Bingham.
“This was getting insane,” he said comparing Cummings to “a homicidal robot”.
He sacked them on 13 November 2020 but noted that they left “both taking with them boxes of material, emails, etc they were to use to confect their future attacks”.
However, the former prime minister claimed that it becamee much easier to govern once the two were out.
“I felt as if a great weight had been lifted - and for the government as a whole, thngs began to get dramatically better.”
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