Others on the list include: Paul Stephenson, the former Vote Leave communications director who is now a partner in PR firm Hanbury Strategy; James Starkie, who was seconded to No 10 from the Home Office and now runs his own PR firm; Damon Poole, who now works as a special adviser to Health Secretary Sajid Javid; Hugh Bennett, who remains in No 10 as a Brexit adviser; Chloe Westley, also a special adviser at No 10; and Ben Warner, the Vote Leave data guru whose analysis of the pandemic was pivotal in triggering the first lockdown.
None of them has said or done anything to suggest they might ever have plotted against the Prime Minister. One other former Vote Leave figure, though, does have a track record of stabbing Boris Johnson in the back: Michael Gove.
Cummings, of course, used to work for Gove when he was education secretary, and always seems to have had a higher opinion of the Cabinet Office Minister than of the Prime Minister.
Cummings told the BBC that he had brokered a deal after the 2016 EU referendum victory which would see Johnson installed as prime minister because: “Michael did not want to run for the leadership contest – he would be chancellor.”
In the event, Gove decided he did want to run for leader, having decided Johnson was not up to the job. Johnson withdrew from the leadership contest as a result, and Theresa May became prime minister.
When Johnson did get the top job (after beating Gove in the 2019 leadership contest), he did not make Gove chancellor. So was Cummings plotting with Gove after Johnson’s landslide election victory? And was his reference to “a few dozen” people merely a smokescreen to protect the tiny circle of people who really were discussing Johnson’s downfall?
One former associate of Cummings said: “His suggestion that discussions were going on in No 10 about getting rid of the Prime Minister just doesn’t ring true, because that’s not how he operates.
“If he was really plotting something like that, he would have arranged a meeting at someone’s house, with a maximum of four or five people present, and kept it well away from the workplace.”
Cummings may have inadvertently provided a clue as to who else might have wanted the Prime Minister gone.
He told Laura Kuenssberg that: “We only got him in there because we had to solve a certain problem, not because he was the right person to be running the country.”
His reasoning was that: “He doesn’t have a plan, he doesn’t know how to be Prime Minister.” He added: “I thought he had some abilities in some ways, also kind of completely hopeless in some ways.”
