Why is No. 10 turning on Dominic Cummings over ‘leaks’?

After yet another week of government leaks of private correspondence sent by the Prime Minister, Downing Street has hit back. But it’s not to deny the contents of any of the messages – which range from WhatsApps with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince over football to discussions with UK entrepreneur James Dyson about ventilators – it’s to blame Dominic Cummings for the messages being made public in the first place. Late last night multiple papers (though notably not the Boris-sceptic Daily Mail) published briefings by a Downing Street source that Johnson’s former senior aide was likely behind the stories.

A government figure tells the Telegraph that ‘if you join the dots it looks like it’s coming from Dom’ – and suggests that Cummings’s motivation is likely his bitterness that since he left Downing Street ‘rather than falling apart, the government has been making great progress’. While they’re at it, Downing Street ‘sources’ have also returned to the well-trodden topic of who leaked the news of the second lockdown to the press, suggesting that the ‘chatty rat’ was in fact Cummings.