FORMER Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings yesterday turned on his former political master when he revealed that he and others from the Vote Leave campaign discussed ousting Boris Johnson as Prime Minister within days of winning the 2019 General Election.
And in an interview with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg, broadcast on BBC 2, he said: “I think the sooner he goes, the better for sure.”
Cummings, who led the campaign to leave the EU during the 2016 Brexit referendum, helped the Tories increase their Commons majority to 80 seats in the December 2019 poll, but left No 10 in the autumn after a power struggle.
He was Johnson’s closest aide until he quit, but it seems the mood changed after the election when he and the Vote Leave team appeared no longer to be welcome by Johnson’s now wife Carrie.
READ MORE: Viewers struggle to side with Dominic Cummings in BBC interview
“Before even mid-January we were having meetings in Number 10 saying it’s clear that Carrie [Johnson] wants rid of all of us,” he said. “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.
“[Johnson] doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t know how to be Prime Minister and we only got him in there because we had to solve a certain problem not because he was the right person to be running the country.”
Kuenssberg asked him “what kind of con” he had pulled off on the British public getting Johnson into Downing Street.
Cummings said he does not think it was a “con” as they were “trying to solve very hard problems in the order that we can solve them in”.
Asked if unelected officials who helped to campaign and elect someone as Prime Minister, then discussing getting rid of him days after the vote was okay, he said: “That’s politics.”
Cummings went on to explain the split, saying Johnson was “fed up with the media portrayal of him being a kind of puppet for the Vote Leave team, it was driving him round the bend”.
There were also disagreements over the strategy on handling the pandemic, for improving the country and over the-now Mrs Johnson’s increasing influence over how Government was run.
“I had a plan, I was trying to get things done, he didn’t have a plan... he didn’t have an agenda,” he continued.
“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.
“Also he knew that we basically disagreed about what was happening on Covid and he knew that I was blaming him for not having acted in September, which I was.”
READ MORE: Kevin McKenna: England now has herd immunity ... to Johnson’s lethal strain of politics
A Number 10 spokesman 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.”
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