Boris Johnson offered Dominic Cummings a seat in the House of Lords before he was sensationally booted out of Number 10, the former chief of staff has claimed.
Mr Cummings also said the prime minister wanted to give his wife Carrie a government job with “lots of foreign travel”, according to an interview in The Spectator.
If Mr Cummings had taken a peerage he would have been able to vote on laws and could even have been appointed as a minister.
Mr Johnson came to a similar arrangement with another of his advisers, alleged Mr Cummings.
Lord Frost was an unelected special adviser and Brexit negotiator but has been given a peerage and the powers of a minister.
A No 10 source denied the claims, describing them as, “risible, like much of Dom’s recent output”.
But the allegations certainly stack up.
Late last year the PM was accused of seeking to “discredit” the House of Lords by packing it with cronies after he handed a peerage to a Tory donor once embroiled in claims of cash for access.
Earl Attlee, a Tory peer and grandson of the former Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, said peers “ought to have no questions about his or her probity” and that it was “shameful” Johnson had appointed 53 new peers in a year.
“It’s terrible to have far too many new members,” he said.
“If you pack it as hard as you can with far too many people, it becomes patently obvious that it needs to be reformed.”
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