A rift has opened up at the top of Boris Johnson’s government between advisers loyal to the prime minister’s controversial chief aide Dominic Cummings and other senior Johnson allies.



After an extraordinary 24 hours of anonymous statements from Downing Street officials attacking the German chancellor Angela Merkel and threatening to withdraw from security cooperation with the EU, Johnson has been urged by other senior Number 10 figures and members of his cabinet to reconsider the combative approach adopted by Cummings and his contingent of former Vote Leave aides.

As talks with Brussels appeared close to breakdown on Tuesday, BuzzFeed News can reveal details of a “parallel government” being run out of Number 10 by Johnson’s longstanding adviser Eddie Lister, how the prime minister’s top team is split over its aggressive media strategy, and an imminent power grab over the approach the Conservative Party should take during an election — pencilled in for the end of November — and who should run the campaign.

Several backbench Tory MPs and a core group of cabinet ministers led by Julian Smith, Robert Buckland, Matt Hancock, and Nicky Morgan have raised concerns over the direction taken by Number 10 in recent weeks.

Smith, the Northern Ireland secretary, tweeted a public rebuke to a Downing Street official — widely assumed to be Cummings — who told the Spectator magazine on Monday that the government could threaten to withhold security cooperation from the EU in order to convince Brussels not to delay Brexit. Morgan, the culture secretary, raised the Spectator briefing at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.