Cummings’s attack spells big trouble for Boris

When No. 10 briefed newspapers on Thursday that Dominic Cummings was the source of leaks of the Prime Minister’s text conversations with Sir James Dyson and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and pointed to Cummings as the ‘chatty rat’ who leaked news of the November lockdown, I said this looked like an exercise in mutually assured destruction.

And so it has turned out. The PM’s former chief aide — who was closer to Boris Johnson than anyone till he was forced out at the end of last year — has issued a statement that explicitly brands Johnson as ‘unethical’ and implicitly calls him a liar.

Cummings says he does not possess the relevant Dyson texts, so could not be the leaker, and that he can prove the PM knows both that he is not the ‘chatty rat’ and that the finger of suspicion was pointed at another aide, Henry Newman.

He recalls the PM saying to him: 

If Newman is confirmed as the leaker than I will have to fire him, and this will cause me very serious problems with Carrie [the PM’s fiancée] as they’re best friends…[pause] perhaps we could get the Cabinet Secretary to stop the lead enquiry.