Removing Boris Johnson from power is like ‘fixing the drains,’ says his former senior adviser
There is a joke in British political circles that Dominic Cummings exists to destroy prime ministers. After his organization Vote Leave won the Brexit referendum in 2016, David Cameron resigned. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, stepped down when her Brexit deal was derailed. Now it appears to be the turn of Boris Johnson, Cummings’s former boss. Cummings was his most senior adviser — his de facto chief of staff — and the architect of the Tories’ 2019 landslide victory in the general election. A year later he lost a power struggle with Johnson’s third wife, Carrie, and left 10 Downing Street, the seat of British power, with a cardboard box in his arms.
Now, Johnson is flailing. There has been a series of leaks about his staff breaking the lockdown rules they created during the early months of the pandemic while, in the country they governed, people died alone, without loved ones for company. (Cummings himself was accused of breaking lockdown rules by leaving London for the north of England in April 2020 for, he says, security reasons.) It often seems as if Johnson and his team did nothing but party. There was a party for Johnson’s birthday; a party where invitees were encouraged to “bring your own booze!”; a party the night before the queen buried Prince Philip, her husband of 73 years, at a socially distanced funeral.
As a result of Partygate, as it is known, Johnson’s polling is in free fall, his Conservative Party is in open revolt, and his premiership is hanging by a thread. He is the subject of two inquiries: one by a civil servant, and one by the police. He has been accused of lying to Parliament about the parties, a resigning offense, and it is believed that, even if he hangs on, his party will drop him before the general election in 2024. It is also believed that Cummings, who earlier this year used his Substack to break the story of one illicit gathering at Downing Street in May 2020, is the source of some of the most damning leaks that have appeared in the British press.
Removing Johnson from power, Cummings tells me over Zoom, is “an unpleasant but necessary job. It’s like sort of fixing the drains.” [Continue reading…]