Cummings ‘set to quit in six months’

Dominic Cummings is considering quitting as Boris Johnson’s senior adviser later this year, well-placed sources said.

According to an insider who knows Cummings well, he intends to step back from the political front line after the UK finally leaves the EU in December.

The suggestion that he could be out in six months was reinforced by a separate claim that he will consider himself ‘largely redundant’ by Christmas if he completes his shake-up of Whitehall mandarins by then.

The report appeared in the Spectator magazine, where Cummings used to work, and where his wife Mary Wakefield is a commissioning editor.

The question marks over his long-term future follow a political furore over Cummings’s decision to drive his wife and young son 260 miles to his parents’ farm in Durham at the start of the lockdown.

While they were there, the couple visited a nearby beauty spot.

Boris Johnson has refused to back widespread calls – including from 40 Tory MPs – for Cummings, 48, to resign, arguing it is time to “move on” after a weeklong controversy over his conduct.

The claim that Cummings could be gone in six months will lead some to believe it is a face-saving measure to resolve a bitter clash between the prime minister and rebel Conservative MPs.

A defiant Cummings could say he has resisted the latest in a long line of attempts by his political foes to sack him; Johnson could say he has shown he is loyal to his inner circle and strong enough to withstand pressure from public opinion and the media.

Meanwhile, Cummings’s Tory MP detractors could say that despite the six-month wait, they have achieved their objective of removing him from No 10.

Cummings’s allies insist his exit is not connected to the lockdown rumpus and that he “never intended” to stay in Downing Street after achieving his two main aims: cutting the UK’s last ties with Brussels and reforming the Civil Service.