Cummings has been involved in a controversy with the London Prime Minister’s Office in a number of sensitive diversion cases, raising the possibility of a serious domestic political scandal, MTI writes.
Cummings, who resigned as chief chancellor at the end of 2020 after internal power wrangling, was neither a member of Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party nor of government. At the same time, he was by far the most influential non-ministerial member among government employees and had a direct influence not only on major policy issues but also on employee decisions within the government.
Among the leakages that have surfaced in recent days are text messages exchanged between billionaire industrial contractor Johnson and Sir James Dyson in March.
After the coronavirus epidemic escalated, the British government at the time asked many large companies to switch to mass production of ventilators.
According to the publicly available exchange of messages, Johnson promised Dyson to “settle” tax issues that caused major concern to the contractor if his company became involved in manufacturing ventilators by deploying foreign workers to the UK.
Government departments accused Cummingst of leaking the exchanged messages.
It is also responsible for the early leakage of plans around Downing Street that included details of a second nationwide lockdown ordered last November to curb the coronavirus pandemic.
Dominic Cummings on his blog In his mega post, published Friday evening, he issued sharp rebutts, denying that the leak could have been in any of the cases that had arisen.
Johnson’s former chief adviser also launched a fierce counterattack against his former boss, writing, among other things, that Boris Johnson was planning to renovate his street home from secret donations from his supporters.
Cummings wrote in the blog that while he told the prime minister that in his view, this plan would be “unethical, foolish, even illegal, and almost certainly violates standards for reporting political donations.”
Cummings puts it sadly to see how deeply the prime minister and his office have fallen below the standards of efficiency and integrity the country deserves.
A Downing Street spokesman said at the BBC’s request that the Prime Minister’s office had not commented on “speculation” about whether Dominic Cummings was responsible for the disputed leaks.
