Boris Johnson advisor Dominic Cummings is a “Maoist right winger” who is “taking a sledgehammer” to the British constitution, Dominic Grieve has said.
The ex-attorney general, who led attempts to block a no-deal Brexit, has hit out at the prime minister’s chief-of-staff, who he claimed was “spreading disinformation” from Downing Street to divide anti-Brexit MPs.
Grieve rubbished claims that a new law which stops no-deal on October 31 - the Benn Act - had loopholes, and told a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester that Cummings wanted to wreck the UK’s political system.
Grieve, who has been feuding with Cummings over Brexit and is now an Independent Conservative MP, said Number 10 was aiming to divide as he was among 21 Tories kicked out of the parliamentary party for defying Johnson over Brexit.
MPs fighting a no-deal Brexit, who are holding fire on tabling a vote of no-confidence in Johnson, should “stick to their guns”, he said.
Grieve and other anti-Brexit MPs who drafted the new anti- no-deal law were accused of “foreign collusion” in a report in the Mail on Sunday.
The report claimed Grieve, Tory Sir Oliver Letwin and Labour’s Hilary Benn were in receipt of foreign funds and sought the help of EU advisors to write the legislation.
Grieve said the report was completely untrue and Cummings could be behind a “serious piece of defamation”.
“This is a classic example of sort of corruption of our political system that is now coming in at the hands of Mr Cummings,” he said.
Grieve, who backs a second referendum on Brexit, added: “I do worry that the closer we have got to October 31 the more the present prime minister has departed from every conceivable Conservative principle in order to ratchet up the rhetoric, and he is now employing as his chief of staff a sort of Maoist right winger, with a belief in destruction of politics which is so out of keeping with our party’s tradition as to be frankly astonishing.”
It comes after the five-week prorogation of parliament, as the UK faces Brexit on October 31, was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court.
“What is this culture war on our constitutional traditions,” Grieve added.
He went on to claim the prorogation was “an own goal of spectacular proportions” and Cummings was using Brexit to attempt the “destruction of politics”.
“If we continue this sort of behaviour, it is taking a sledgehammer to a rather delicately constructed edifice,” he said. “Now it is quite robust but there are bits flying off it, the china is breaking and I don’t think Mr Cummings will be around for the next few years to get the superglue out and put it back together again.”
Number 10 has continued to insist that the government will “comply with the law” but that the UK is leaving at Halloween.