Dominic Cummings has worked for Boris Johnson at Number 10 since he became Prime Minister in July (Picture: AFP)

A journalist who won a legal battle against the Prime Minister’s top adviser has told of the dirty tactics Brexit strategist Dominic Cummings used against him.

Former Financial Times correspondent Chris Cook won a legal bid against Cummings during the adviser’s time at the Department for Education in 2012, before he joined Boris Johnson’s top team in July this year.

Writing for the news site Tortoise, Cook reveals that Cummings, who was then working for Michael Gove, ‘told other journalists that I was mentally ill’ and used an official Conservative Twitter account to attack him.

The journalist says that he got hold of emails exchanges between Gove and Cummings, who was recently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a Channel 4 drama, that were sent on private email addresses rather than their official government accounts.




Cook used a law designed to allow the public to access certain government documents to try and get hold of copies of the emails through officials at the Department for Education to see whether or not Cummings and Gove would disclose them.

Dominic Cummings was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Channel 4 programme ‘Brexit: The Uncivil War’ (Picture: PA)

However, civil servants were unable to find the emails after they were requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Cook claims the Cummings and the Department for Education continued to deny the emails existed, spending £12,000 on barristers’ fees in the process.

Cook said: ‘I had a hunch: I suspected that if I requested an email sent privately by Gove under the Freedom of Information Act, a transparency law, they would deny it existed.’

The law states that officials should not conceal or destroy information or stop it from being disclosed.

The Department for Education then claimed that private emails ‘do not fall within the FOI [Freedom of Information] Act’.

However, the Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates the disclosure of government information, said at the time: ‘It is certainly possible that some information in private emails could fall within the scope of the Freedom of Information Act if it concerns government business.’

The Information Commissioner then issued new guidelines making it clear that official information discussed on private email addresses should still be published.

Michael Gove and the Department for Education then launched a legal challenge that sought to establish that the emails should not be disclosed.

Journalist Chris Cook has spoken about his legal spat with Dominic Cummings (Picture: BBC)

However, a year later in September 2012, the department dropped the case and conceded that the private emails about government business should have been released.

Cook writes of Cummings: ‘He sought to make it a story about a strange journalist fixated on technicalities, rather than a cabinet minister potentially committing a criminal offence.

‘But I eventually won on the law and on the facts. I got an apology from the Conservative party’s head of press for his conduct.’

He went on to say: ‘And after a year of legal wrangling, in which they mounted increasingly baffling arguments disputing whether emails sent by ministers to civil servants were really government business, they conceded I was right.

‘They had broken the law.’

In one email, the Prime Minister’s most trusted adviser said: ‘i will not answer any further emails to my official DfE [Department for Education] account or from conservatives.com [his official party email address]’.



‘i will only answer things that come from gmail accounts from people who i know who they arc [sic]. i suggest that you do the same in general but thats obv up to you guys – i can explain in person the reason for this…’

Cummings joined Boris Johnson’s team at Number 10 after spearheading the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The 47-year-old was played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Channel 4 program ‘Brexit: The Unicivil War’, which was broadcast in January.

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