‘How dare you!’ – former Labour MP blasts PM over comments about over-80s
VETERAN former Welsh Labour MP Ann Clwyd has accused Boris Johnson of wanting to send people aged over 80 “to the knackers yard” following comments reported by Dominic Cummings.
According to the Prime Minister’s ex-senior aide, who has become an arch critic of Mr Johnson, WhatsApp messages sent from the PM on October 15 last year rejected the idea of an autumn lockdown.
One of the messages said the government should “recalibrate” their thinking about imposing another lockdown as “hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital”.
Mr Johnson is said to have written: “I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities.
“The median age is 82 – 81 for men 85 for women.
“That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and live longer.
“Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4%) and of those virtually all survive.
“And I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff.
“Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate.”
Another message reportedly said: “There are max 3 million in this country aged over 80”.
In an interview screened on BBC2 last week, Mr Cummings said that as the second Covid wave built last autumn, Mr Johnson’s “attitude at that point was a weird mix of, ‘er, partly it’s all nonsense and lockdowns don’t work anyway’ and partly, ‘well this is terrible but the people who are dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80’.” Mr Cummings added: “Lots of people heard the Prime Minister say that,
the
Prime Minister texted that to me and other people.”
The ex-aide accused the PM of putting “his own political interests ahead of people’s lives, for sure”.
In response to Mr Johnson’s reported comments, Ms Clwyd, who represented Cynon Valley at Westminster until 2019, tweeted: “So according to the PM over 80s are for the knackers yard!
“Well at a very lively 84 not long out of active politics I strongly resent such a cavalier attitude to human life. “How dare you PM!” Ms Clwyd told us: “As soon as I heard about this, I thought, ‘there he goes again’.
“There seems to be no let-up in the stupid comments that he makes.
“To offend a considerable percentage of the population by saying things like this is no way for a Prime Minister to behave.
“I don’t think he thinks things through before he says them – he just blurts them out.
“I said something very similar to him in the House of Commons two years ago, pointing out that I had a lot more respect for his father than for him. “Stanley Johnson served as an MEP at the same time as me and made some valid contributions.
“At the time he was in favour of Britain being in the EU although he changed his tune later when his son got into Downing Street.
“After I’d compared him unfavourably to his father, Boris Johnson asked me why I’d criticised him, given that he’d been very kind to me when I was an MEP and he was a reporter.
“I don’t remember any of these occasions of kindness, as a matter of fact, but even if I had it wouldn’t have influenced my criticism of him.”
Ms Clwyd said: “I was an MP for 45 years and an MEP for five, and now I’m still campaigning in my eighties.”
She added that the reported remarks were “totally disgusting and will make many older people feel undervalued and discarded”.
Responding to the allegations made by Mr Cummings in the interview, a No 10 spokeswoman said: “Since the start of the pandemic, the prime minister has taken the necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods, guided by the best scientific advice.
“The government he leads has delivered the fastest vaccination rollout in Europe, saved millions of jobs through the furlough scheme and prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed through three national lockdowns.
“The government is entirely focused on emerging cautiously from the pandemic and building back better.”