Dominic Cummings launched another broadside against Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie, yesterday — claiming the prime minister told him she was driving him “crackers” and wanted to get her a job “with lots of foreign travel”.
Johnson’s former adviser also said the prime minister had suggested Cummings could be in line for a peerage when he left Downing Street last November and regarded himself as “the king” who deliberately presided over “chaos” in No 10.
Cummings’s comments, in an interview with The Spectator, are the latest in a string of claims he has made against Johnson’s wife, who was instrumental in his ousting.
He said that shortly before he left Downing Street he held a meeting with Johnson at which the prime minister questioned him about whether he had been responsible for leaking stories about the couple’s dog urinating in their flat. Cummings said: “We sat on the sofa and he started reading out questions from his phone and I said, ‘Have you lost your mind? Your crazy girlfriend is sitting upstairs texting you questions?’
“And he was like, ‘Omigod, you’re right, she’s driving me crackers. We’ve got to find her a job with lots of foreign travel. Could we get the cabinet secretary to give her a job on Cop26, travelling round with Kate Middleton?’ That’s the weird thing: part of his brain knows that his girlfriend is crackers, but he’s also trapped.”
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He added: “Well, you know this crazy thing happens with people, they just get trapped by crazy girlfriends. It’s not the first time it’s happened.”
Cummings said that he and Johnson had not spoken since he had left Downing Street. “I walked out. And then she [Carrie] was terrified that Boris would reverse-ferret so she deliberately blew everything up in the media to cause maximum carnage. So then all relations between us were severed and I haven’t spoken to him since.”
Cummings also claimed that Johnson had suggested he might be given a peerage when he left No 10, before appearing to laugh off the offer. “He said it but then he almost immediately started laughing and realised that that was not exactly the sort of thing that would buy me off,” he said.
Cummings also repeated claims that Johnson was reluctant to bring order to the Downing Street operation because he preferred to work in an atmosphere of chaos.
“I said to him in July, ‘You’re happier to live in chaos than to give me the power to sort it out’,” he said. “And he laughed and said, ‘That’s 100 per cent right. I’m quite happy to live with the chaos because then everyone will stick to the king — which is me.’
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“Chaos doesn’t scare him the way it does most people. He thinks it makes everyone powerless against him.”
He also claimed that officials might have deliberately leaked footage of Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, kissing a close aide to remove him from office.
“I suspect that all his officials knew what was happening, and they knew that what I said about him was true, and someone in his private office will also have had access to CCTV and thought, ‘Ah, we’ll get rid of that lying bastard’.”
Asked whether he was disappointed that Hancock resigned as a result of a sex scandal rather than for the failures in dealing with Covid-19 that Cummings has laid at his door, he replied: “Well, obviously it would have been better if Boris had fired him last May when I told him to. But if it ends with a sex scandal, fine by me.”
A No 10 source said: “These claims are untrue.”
