Boris Johnson fell out with his former chief adviser Dominic Cummings after growing tired of being treated like a “young and inexperienced king” who needed to be kept in order, Michael Gove has revealed.
The levelling up secretary, who is close to Cummings and was a figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign beside Johnson, said the pair fell out soon after the 2019 election because Johnson no longer wanted to be treated “as a tempestuous thoroughbred, with a strong whip and bridle to keep him in order”.
Gove offered the account in a new book, Johnson at 10, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell, which documents the chaos and downfall of the Johnson premiership. It argues that Johnson blamed Cummings and his wife, Carrie Johnson, to disguise his own reluctance to take difficult decisions in Downing Street. Seldon’s book states that Johnson described his then fiancee Carrie as “mad and crazy” as he used her as an excuse to avoid confrontations. Ed Lister, Johnson’s longtime adviser, said: “He thrives on chaos. They were all his decisions.”
It also argues that Cummings increasingly cut Johnson out of the decision-making process in his own government. It states that Cummings would tell officials and ministers: “Don’t tell the PM” or “Oh, don’t bother him with this”. The book claims it eventually led to the extraordinary outburst from Johnson: “I am meant to be in control. I am the führer. I’m the king who takes the decisions.”
A spokesperson for Johnson told the Times, which has serialised the book, that the revelations were “the usual malevolent and sexist twaddle” from the former PM’s enemies.
Gove is featured in the book describing how relations between Cummings and Johnson soured soon after the 2019 election victory, which saw them secure an 80-strong majority for the Conservatives. “He gave no other thought to a different way of running No 10 after the landslide than relying still on Dom almost exclusively, though he started to resent the fact that Dom would treat him if not like Jeeves and Wooster, then perhaps like the lord protector with a young and inexperienced king,” said Gove.
“After the election, Boris no longer wanted to be treated as a tempestuous thoroughbred, with a strong whip and bridle to keep him in order. Dom could be insulting and rude. Some days the prime minister could laugh it off, but other days he didn’t.”
Cummings also barred Johnson from meeting Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs, it states. “It was a very odd insight into the mentality of No 10 and resulted in a grovelling phone call of apology,” said Brady. “Cummings had contempt for our MPs and thought that we should be grateful for being in government, for the general election result, and that our job was now merely to behave.”
Cummings ultimately left Downing Street in November 2020 after losing out in a power struggle with Carrie Johnson. However, officials told Seldon that both Cummings and the former prime minister’s wife were used by Johnson to deflect responsibility.
“It suited him to make people think she was to blame for things not happening,” an official is quoted as saying. Another aide said: “He played us all off against each other. He would tell us that she was impossible to deal with, she was mad, crazy and he couldn’t control her, would do whatever she wanted. Then he’d go upstairs and tell her that we were impossible and he couldn’t control us. He liked to pour petrol on both sides and see what happened to the fire.”
