Boris Johnson's sister launches blistering attack on 'psycopath' Michael Gove over Tory leadership
Boris Johnson's sister has launched a blistering attack on Michael Gove, labelling him as a "political psychopath" and a "Westminster suicide bomber".
Rachel Johnson said Gove had stabbed her brother in the “back, front and threw him under a bus” when he decided to turn on Boris Johnson and run for the Tory leadership himself.
Writing in her Mail on Sunday column, Johnson accused the justice secretary of executing the biggest "act of treachery in modern political history" and also criticised his wife Sarah Vine and former aide Dominic Cummings.
"Michael Gove is the man who has said many times that he is prepared to put his principles before his friends, that he will sacrifice anything and anyone on the high altar of his ideology," she wrote.
"But he must see, after what he has done, that he is now cast in the public mind not as a heroic man of conviction, but as a sort of Westminster suicide bomber, whose deadly belt of explosives has been detonated not by his own hand, but by his own wife."
Gove, who has ground to make up on the current favourite Theresa May, earlier defended his decision.
He told the BBC's Andrew Marr show that it would have been a "betrayal of this country" if he had supported Boris Johnson's campaign.