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Boris Johnson offered me a peerage, claims Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings attends an interview with BBC's Laura Kuenssberg in London - Jeff Over/BBC/Handout via Reuters
Dominic Cummings attends an interview with BBC's Laura Kuenssberg in London - Jeff Over/BBC/Handout via Reuters

Dominic Cummings has claimed Boris Johnson offered him a peerage when he was leaving Downing Street last year.

The former Number 10 senior adviser also alleged that the Prime Minister discussed giving his now wife Carrie Johnson a role that involved lots of travel.

The allegations were made in an interview with The Spectator magazine, the second Mr Cummings has given since leaving office, having spoken to the BBC last month.

Downing Street issued a blanket denial of the new comments, with a Number 10 source saying: “These claims are untrue.”

Mr Cummings, who led the Vote Leave campaign that delivered Brexit in 2016, was Mr Johnson’s closest adviser in Downing Street before a spectacular falling out.

The strategist left Downing Street at the end of last year after feuding with Mrs Johnson, then Mr Johnson’s fiancée, and has since become a fierce public critic of the Prime Minister.

Mr Cummings claimed in his Spectator interview that he was offered elevation to the House of Lords by Mr Johnson, though it is unclear from the quotations how seriously the proposal was made.

He said of Mr Johnson’s peerage offer: “He said it but then he almost immediately started laughing and realised that that was not exactly the sort of thing that would buy me off. All reports about me getting big payoffs are all false.”

The Prime Minister has handed peerages to a host of former Tory MPs and donors to the Conservative Party since entering Number 10.

Mr Cummings also reignited his feud with Mrs Johnson, who married the Prime Minister in May at a service in Westminster Cathedral.

He recounted an alleged conversation he had with Mr Johnson before his Downing Street departure where the Prime Minister floated giving his other half a new role.

Mr Johnson is quoted saying: “Omigod, you’re right, she’s driving me crackers. We’ve got to find her a job with lots of foreign travel. Could we get the Cabinet Secretary to give her a job on COP26, travelling round with Kate Middleton?”

COP26 is a reference to the UN Climate Change Conference, which is taking place in Glasgow in November.

Asked about the comments Mr Cummings made about Mrs Johnson, a Number 10 source reiterated they were “untrue”.

On Wednesday, Mr Johnson talked publicly about Mrs Johnson’s announcement that she is pregnant with the couple’s second child, and that she had a miscarriage earlier in the year.

Mr Johnson told a reporter who asked how the couple were doing: “Well, we’re all in very good shape. Thank you very much though for your good wishes. Much appreciated.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Cummings revealed he had more than 1,500 subscribers to his Substack email, which is regularly sent out to subscribers. It costs £100 a year to subscribe.

He recounted another conversation with the Prime Minister, allegedly about how Mr Johnson said he was happy to allow a degree of chaos as he ran Downing Street.

“I said to him in July, ‘you’re happier to live in chaos than to give me the power to sort it out’,” Mr Cummings recounted.

“And he laughed and said: ‘That’s 100 per cent right. I’m quite happy to live with the chaos because then everyone will stick to the king – which is me.’

“Chaos doesn’t scare him the way it does most people. He thinks it makes everyone powerless against him.”

Mr Cummings said he did not take drugs but used to smoke “two or three packs” of cigarettes a day when living in Russia after graduating from the University of Oxford with a first class degree in history. He said he stopped smoking about 10 years ago.

He also described the toll of leading the Vote Leave campaign, which played a central part in defying expectations and securing a Brexit vote in the 2016 EU referendum, had on him.

“I’ve always slept OK until quite recently, but the referendum aged me 10 years in 10 months, and I was not the same person at the end of it,” Mr Cummings said.

“I was working till 11 every day and then there was one period after our boy was born in March 2016 when he was ill in hospital so I’d work till 11, then go into hospital to sit with him through the night, then go back to work.

“If you live like that for quite a long time, you start seeing wavy lines.”