Boris Johnson regrets not sacking ‘homicidal robot’ Dominic Cummings over Barnard Castle debacle

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, Mr Johnson charted the collapse of his relationship with Mr Cummings from the high point of them working to win the EU referendum in 2016.

But the ex-prime minister has alleged that the aftermath of Mr Cummings’s alleged lockdown-breaking trip to Barnard Castle in 2020 led to the former chief of staff using Partygate as a form of revenge.

In his new book, Mr Johnson recounts hearing Mr 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.

Mr Johnson noted: “I mean WTF?”

“You might have thought that the honourable thing to do would have been to resign, if that was how he really felt,” he added.

He suggested that Mr Cummings may have been like the Shakespearean character Iago, pursuing “the motive-hunting of the motiveless malignant”. Mr Johnson also targeted his former director of communications Lee Cain.

But Mr 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 Mr Cummings had contracted Covid and fled from London with his family to the northeast when the rest of the country was in lockdown. He 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 Mr Cummings.

But Mr 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 Mr Cummings to give a press conference in the Downing Street garden ahead of the daily press briefing. Mr Johnson claimed Mr Cummings’s “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 Mr Cummings and Mr Cain as “great colleagues and friends” during the vote Leave campaign and claimed Mr Cummings’s 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 Mr Cummings and Mr 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 Mr Cain and Mr Cummings were behind the “chatty rat” briefings and claimed “their behaviour got weirder and weirder”.

Mr Johnson makes it clear that the final straw was a “spiteful briefing” against adviser Kate Bingham.

“This was getting insane,” he said, comparing Mr Cummings to “a homicidal robot”.

Mr Johnson 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 became 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, things began to get dramatically better.”