Kemi Badenoch “is going to go, probably this year”, Boris Johnson’s former aide has forecasted.
Dominic Cummings described the Conservative Party leader as a “goner”, and said Reform UK could win up to 150 seats at the next election with “Nigel and an iPhone”.
He described Nigel Farage’s Reform UK as a “vehicle” for voters to say they “despise” Westminster.
Conservative shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately defended Mrs Badenoch, who she described as a “good leader” during a “hard time” for her party, and suggested Mr Cummings was trying to “rock the boat”.
In a Sky News interview, Mr Cummings said: “Kemi is going to go, probably this year.”
He added: “There’s already people who are organising to get rid of her, and I think that that will work. If it doesn’t work this year, it will definitely happen after next May.
“She’s a goner, so there’s going to be a big transition there.”
The former No 10 adviser also said that the Conservative Party had possibly “crossed the event horizon and actually aren’t salvageable”, and added that “it might be dead”.
On Reform UK, which has five seats in the Commons, he said: “They can win 50, 100, 150 seats with Reform as Nigel and an iPhone.
“But they can’t win an overall general election and have a plan for government and have a serious team able to take over in Downing Street and govern and control Whitehall with one man and an iPhone.”
Mr Cummings told the broadcaster that “Reform is a vehicle for people to say ‘we despise you, Westminster, we hate both the old parties, we hate Whitehall, we hate the old media, we hate the whole f***ing lot of you'”.
He added: “Farage going up in the polls is the expression of that core feeling.”
Mr Cummings also reflected on Mr Johnson’s departure from Downing Street in September 2022, accusing the former prime minister of “rewriting history, and a lot of the media just kind-of went along with it”.
Reflecting on how some insiders felt at the time, Mr Cummings said: “‘We told people we were going to do a whole bunch of things, he’s now doing the opposite – OK, we should get rid of him.'”
Asked about Mrs Badenoch’s leadership, Ms Whately told Times Radio on Wednesday: “It was always going to take some time for people to want to hear from us.”
Mrs Badenoch beat rival Robert Jenrick in the head-to-head final stage of her party’s leadership election last year.
Ms Whately said she had heard from senior Conservatives who had told her to “‘give it at least two years before people are going to want to hear from you again'”.
Responding to Mr Cummings, she later told Sky News: “We do know that Dominic Cummings likes to rock the boat, that’s something he has a track record of doing.
“My experience working alongside Kemi Badenoch is that she is a good leader and she’s leading our party through a hard time.
“Now, we had a really tough election result clearly at the last general election. People told us very clearly at the ballot box that they were frustrated with us, I think particularly frustrated at some of the things that happened at the tail end of our time in government, including the time that Dominic Cummings was in fact involved, clearly when Boris Johnson was prime minister.
“And people were for instance very unhappy about the rising cost of living driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but we need to take the time to listen to what people are telling us, to reflect on that, and to come back with the right offer to the public at the next general election.”
Ms Whately said Mr Farage had a “big state answer” to political problems alongside “an irresponsible set of unfunded fantasy economics”.
