Boris Johnson is said to be less gung-ho about scrapping the licence fee

Boris Johnson is at odds with his senior Downing Street advisers, including Dominic Cummings, over plans to scrap the BBC licence fee and replace it with a voluntary subscription system, The Times has learnt.

The prime minister favours “reform rather than revolution” and is significantly less gung ho about abandoning the licence fee than Mr Cummings, his chief special adviser, who is said to be “ideological” about the issue.

It has also emerged that John Whittingdale, a minister appointed last week to help to oversee the reforms, said that moving to a subscription model was “politically utterly impossible”.

The culture minister said in an interview the day before he was appointed that the only way to move to a subscription system would be to