A senior government aide has been marched out of Downing Street and then sacked on the spot after being accused of leaking secret Brexit information to allies of former Chancellor Philip Hammond, the Daily Mail reported, citing unnamed sources on Friday.
The sources claimed that last night, Hammond’s special adviser Sonia Khan was confronted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson's chief aide Dominic Cummings who accused her of passing damaging information to the former Chancellor and other Tory MPs who are attempting to prevent a no-deal Brexit.
One of the sources referred to a fiery exchange which followed with Cummings ordering Khan to hand over her mobile phone after she denied the accusations.
Cummings also dismissed Khan that on the spot and told her that her Whitehall security pass was cancelled with immediate effect.
“The cops marched her out of No 10 while she protested her innocence. It was incredible,” the source added.
The scandal comes a few days after Hammond demanded an apology from Johnson over the leak of a document pertaining to the UK government’s concerns over possible chaos following a no-deal Brexit.
Hammond insisted that he wants Johnson to extend apologies to all former ministers in Theresa May’s administration, after the current government wrongly blamed one of them for releasing details of the government's post-no-deal Brexit planning, so-called Operation Yellowhammer.
“It has now become apparent that the leaked document was in fact dated August 2019 and would not therefore have been available to any former minister who is not serving in the current administration,” Hammond pointed out in a letter to the Prime Minister.
The leaked dossier, which was published by the Sunday Times on 18 August, specifically warned of a worst-case scenario in case of a no-Brexit deal, predicting food, fuel and medicine shortages.
The Daily Mail cited an unnamed No 10 source as saying that the dossier was “from when ministers were blocking what needed to be done to get ready to leave and the funds were not available.”
The source claimed that the document “has been deliberately leaked by a former minister in an attempt to influence discussions with EU leaders” on Brexit.