Former Vote Leave boss Dominic Cummings attacks Theresa May’s ‘train wreck’ Brexit strategy
2 min read
Former Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings has blasted Theresa May’s “botched” Brexit strategy and called on the Tories to remove her as Prime Minister.
The former Michael Gove adviser, seen by many as having masterminded the campaign to quit the EU, said civil servants had made “no real preparations” in the process so far.
He claimed mandarins were largely pro-EU and set on “maintenance of this broken system and keeping Britain as closely tied to the EU as possible”.
“Whitehall's real preparations are for the continuation of EU law and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice," he wrote in an open letter to Tory MPs and donors.
“The expectation is that MPs will end up accepting the terrible agreement as voting it down would be to invite chaos.
“In short, the state has made no preparations to leave and plans to make no preparations to leave even after leaving.”
He also hit out at ministers for failing to build the necessary infrastructure needed to manage trade as a “third country”, given the Government’s stated position is to quit the single market, customs union and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.
“Having botched it, it could have partially recovered its blunder by starting to do it afterwards. No such action has been taken,” he adds.
“Downing Street, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office and the Cabinet have made no such preparations and there is no intention of starting.”
He also claimed that the “wiring of power in Downing Street is systemically dysfunctional” and that the Tories’ best hope was to “mitigate the train wreck” by ousting the PM or face the risk of a Jeremy Corbyn government.
He said the party should use the summer 2019 to autumn 2021 period to “change the political landscape”, which he says is “incompatible with the continuation of the May-Hammond brand of stagnation punctuated by rubbish crisis management”.
“If you go into the 2022 campaign after five years of this and the contest is Tory promises versus Corbyn promises, you will be maximising the odds of Corbyn as prime minister,” he adds.
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