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Kemi Badenoch will be gone as Tory leader within a year – and there are plots already under way to oust her, Dominic Cummings has said.

The former Number 10 aide also claimed the Conservative Party “might be dead”.

His remarks came in a wide-ranging interview with Sky News, in which the controversial figure, who served as Boris Johnson’s chief adviser from 2019 to 2020, said Nigel Farage could “definitely” become the next prime minister.

On Ms Badenoch, who won the Tory leadership race last November, Mr Cummings said: “Kemi is going to go, probably this year.

“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.”

In a damning indictment of the party he served, he said: “It’s quite possible the Tories have just, kind of, crossed the event horizon and actually aren’t salvageable.

“Like, everyone sort of assumes that because they’ve always been around, then somehow there must be at least one last chance for them to turn things around, but it’s possible that chance is in their past and doesn’t exist.

“It might be dead.”

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Mr Cummings revealed he has held meetings with Mr Farage and advised him on how to go from “one man and an iPhone” to entering Downing Street.

Asked if the Reform UK leader could be prime minister, he said: “It could definitely happen now, yeah, because the old system’s just so completely broken.

“If he does what I’m suggesting, and actually sets out a path for how Reform is going to change, how Reform is going to bring in people, how it’s structurally going to alter, what it’s going to build, how it is going to do policy, how it can recruit MPs, etc.

“If he does that, then there’ll be a huge surge of interest and support into the whole thing.”

‘One man and an iPhone’

He added: “Reform has been a one-man band. It’s been Nigel and an iPhone.

“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.”

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However, the ex-Downing Street aide was also scathing about Mr Farage’s personal appeal, saying it was his party, not him, that had become an outlet for anti-establishment feeling.

“It’s not exactly correlated with what people think about Nigel himself,” he said.

“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.’

“And Farage going up in the polls is the expression of that core feeling.”

Mr Cummings left his Downing Street role in November 2020 after attracting controversy during the coronavirus lockdown when he drove to Barnard Castle in County Durham and claimed he was testing his eyesight.