Top aide discussed ousting Boris Johnson just after 2019 election win

Dominic Cummings and his allies in the British government talked about trying to “get rid” of Boris Johnson days after he secured a landslide election win, the U.K. prime minister’s former chief aide said Tuesday.

Cummings has attacked the government and his former boss in a number of broadsides since leaving government last year, including in front of a committee of MPs and via an independent newsletter.

In his latest strike, an interview with the BBC airing Tuesday night, Cummings said that by January 2020 he had started to believe Johnson’s wife Carrie Johnson was trying to remove him “and appoint complete clowns to certain key jobs.” He claimed that around this time he and his allies thought that if they hadn’t left Downing Street by the summer, they would be “in the process of trying to get rid of [Johnson] and get someone else in as prime minister.”

“[Johnson] doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t know how to be prime minister,” Cummings said. “We only got him in there because we had to solve a certain problem, not because he was the right person to be running the country.”

Asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg if he saw anything wrong with winning an election and then unelected officials almost immediately discussing getting rid of the prime minister, he replied: “That’s politics.”

The prime minister’s wife has come under particular attack from Cummings.

The former aide said Carrie Johnson had initially been pleased to have former members of the Vote Leave campaign, which won the U.K.’s 2016 Brexit referendum, working in Downing Street but later changed her mind.

A Downing Street spokesperson told the BBC: “Political appointments are entirely made by the prime minister.”

The pro-Brexit Cummings also said that “no-one on Earth” could be certain the U.K. had made the right decision to leave the EU, though he confirmed he still thinks “it’s good that Brexit happened.”