Boris Johnson has said Rishi Sunak is a “stooge” put in place by his former senior adviser Dominic Cummings, according to the former cabinet minister Nadine Dorries. Johnson said: “I heard that Cummings has said he started to plot to get rid of me in January 2020. The plot was always to get Rishi in. I just couldn’t see it at the time. It’s like this Manchurian candidate, their stooge.” Johnson’s attack on Sunak was made in a series of interviews with his staunch ally Dorries for her book The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, which was published on Thursday. Cummings was sacked by Johnson in late 2020 after a bitter falling-out between the two men. Johnson also said the Conservatives were “drifting into defeat” under Sunak. The former prime minister told Dorries the current government was losing voters in “red wall” seats that had voted for Brexit, where he said people were going back to supporting Labour.
He said: “You’ve got to have a positive agenda for change in the country. You know, people still feel hacked off. They voted for change in 2019 and they are drifting back to Labour in those Brexit seats because they are not seeing a changed government. “Nothing to rally behind, nothing; we are just drifting to defeat.” Johnson added: “The whole thing needs a massive kick in the pants … unless we grip it, the results of the local elections will be repeated at a general election, and Starmer will be a complete disaster … I feel a massive, massive sense of frustration that we had an 80-seat majority. We had a fantastic agenda. We could have kept the whole thing going.” He also criticised Sunak’s decision to raise corporation tax from 19% to 25%, a move first announced in 2021 when he was Johnson’s chancellor. He suggested cutting the rate to 10%, asking: “Why the hell are we putting up corporation tax in this way? It’s absolutely mad.” Johnson added: “Why not cut corporation tax to 10%? You know, why don’t we just do what the Irish do? Why not just outbid the Irish? We don’t have to obey international norms on corporation tax … I’m frustrated. I’m seething. I’m a caged beast. I’m a coiled mamba … We’re drifting; we are losing the plot.”