BORIS DENIES ‘LET BODIES’ PILE HIGH’ OUTBURST
PM brands allegation: ‘Total, total rubbish’
BORIS JOHNSON has brushed aside the Downing Street briefing war with a pledge to focus relentlessly on battling Covid.
The Prime Minister refuted claims he was prepared to tolerate thousands more deaths from the virus rather than plunge the country into a third lockdown. He branded allegations that he was ready to see “bodies pile high” as “total total rubbish”. Mr Johnson
insisted voters are fed up with the poisonous spat engulfing Number 10.
Families, he said, were desperate for Government to focus on tackling virus infections and rebuilding the economy.
Mr Johnson’s denial followed days of extraordinary briefings and counter-briefings between his allies and his estranged former chief adviser Dominic Cummings.
The ex-Number 10 aide is expected to use an appearance at a Commons committee next month to challenge the Prime Minister’s handling of the pandemic.
One report yesterday claimed Mr Johnson said he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than order a third lockdown.
Push
He was said to have made the remark in a moment of fury in a meeting after reluctantly agreeing to the second lockdown in England last autumn in a meeting with ministers and advisers.
Asked about the allegation during a local elections visit to Wrexham yesterday, the Prime Minister described it as “total, total rubbish” and maintained that he had “absolutely not” made the remark.
He said voters were not raising the issue with him or with Tory campaigners in the push for the May 6 local elections.
“I’m finding that a lot of this stuff that people are talking about is actually not what’s coming up on the doorstep or the issues that people are raising with me.
“What people want to know about is what is the Government doing to get on with our agenda to unite and level up across the country, to move cautiously but irreversibly through the steps of the road map to unlock and to get our country going.”
And the PM offered the most hope so far of lockdown freedom this summer, saying: “As things stand I think we’ve got a very good chance of opening up totally on June 21.”
As figures showed the daily Covid death toll down to six, with 2,064 new infection cases recorded yesterday, Mr Johnson added: “We’ve got the disease under control.”
He added: “We’ve built up what I think are some pretty robust fortifications against the next wave.
“We’ll have to see how strong they really are in due course.”
The row follows a series of jibes from Mr Cummings in recent days. He quit a key Downing Street role at the end of last year after falling out with the Prime Minister. The former Vote Leave campaign guru rejected claims from Number 10 that he leaked news of the second lockdown last year and accused Mr Johnson of resisting demands for travel bans to try to curb the pandemic.
He has also claimed he opposed an attempt by the Prime Minister to use funds from Tory donors to pay for refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.
Labour sought to exploit the row yesterday.
Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, called for “a full and transparent investigation into everything that’s going on”.
Speaking on a visit to the West Midlands, he said: “Day after day there are new allegations of sleaze, of favours, of privileged access.We need a full investigation to get to the bottom of that
and, most importantly, to make recommendations about changes, because we need to change the rules.” In the Commons, Labour frontbencher Rachel Reeves called the reported remark “stomach churning” and hit out at claims of lobbying and cronyism in the Government.
Raising an urgent question on the row in the Commons, she said: “The Prime Minister is now corrupting the standards of public life expected in high office.”
But Tory ministers scrambled to defend the Prime Minister.
Responding to the urgent question, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said: “I was in the meeting that afternoon with the Prime Minister and other ministers as we looked at what was happening with the virus, the pandemic.”
He added: “We’re dealing with one of the most serious decisions this Prime Minister and any Government has had to face, people have been pointing out quite rightly that tens of thousands of people were dying.
Incredible
“The Prime Minister made a decision in that meeting to trigger a second lockdown, he made a subsequent decision to trigger a third lockdown. This is a Prime Minister who was in hospital himself in intensive care.The idea that he would say any such thing I find incredible.
I was in that room, I never heard language of that kind.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the reports of the outburst were “not true”.
“Look, it is not true, it has been categorically denied by practically everyone,” he said.
“We are getting into the sort of comedy chapter now of these gossip stories – unnamed sources, by unnamed advisers talking about unnamed events.
“None of this is serious. The Prime Minister has been utterly focused on delivering, alongside Cabinet colleagues, the response to Covid.”
IF you’ve been following the briefing wars which have beset the Government in recent weeks, you’ll have some idea of how debilitating the never-ending loop of leaks and rebuttals is becoming. One day it’s stories about things Boris Johnson is supposed to have said – the next it’s about who might have passed on the Prime Minister’s utterings.
Then it’s about someone who is said to have said them, saying that in fact they didn’t say them, but that someone else did. On and on goes this schoolyard stuff, leaking a steady drip of poison into the blood of government.
The BBC has repeated its riveting 1990s documentary series on Watergate. It is worth watching in its own right as a history of one of the most important scandals of the modern world, where the Nixon administration bugged and burgled opposition premises. But it’s also full of nuggets of wisdom that are as true for contemporary politics as they were when the scandal broke in the 1970s.
PERHAPS the most obvious is that the Prime Minister needs to move on from the brouhaha over Dominic Cummings, with Boris Johnson reported to have personally called some newspaper editors to tell them that his former adviser was the leaker-in-chief.
This should not be something any Prime Minister gets involved in. He should pay attention to the advice President Nixon gave his team when he resigned: “Always remember, others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Nixon learned the truth of that advice having spent his political life driven by various hatreds, and as a consequence he eventually destroyed himself and those around him.
While Boris Johnson clearly regards Cummings as treacherous and seems to be determined to force him to suffer the consequences, he needs to remember why he won by a landslide and why the Tories are still buoyant in the polls, despite presiding over the economic catastrophe following Covid.
No matter the many mistakes that have been made, the public has always seen that the Prime Minister was determined to do what was right for the country – a principle that has culminated in the truly astonishing success of the vaccine programme.
No one knew when Boris won in December 2019 that a pandemic was round the corner but the idea that drove that success – that he would get on with making the country better – is the same thought that drives the Conservatives’ poll ratings now.
Voters believe the pandemic isn’t his fault and they consider he is doing his best for the country. In that context, it is beyond sense to put that at risk by indulging in the mudslinging and vendettas of others.
We will only know the truth of yesterday’s claim that the Prime Minister said he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than impose a third lockdown if there are credible witnesses or a tape.
Dominic Cummings supposedly claims to have recorded meetings in another strange echo of Watergate – Nixon was eventually destroyed by evidence of his own secret recordings of Oval Office meetings.
Here is the fundamental issue. Boris has always had his rivalries but the magic of his political success has been his upbeat and optimistic demeanour, to the intense irritation of his opponents.
People like him despite – or perhaps even because of – his obvious flaws. He must not lose sight of that. Nor, of course, should he lose sight of the need
to focus on that landslide election win. Now that the pandemic is beginning to subside, everything is about rebuilding.
With a majority of 80 seats, the only genuine threat to the Government is itself. That means Mr Johnson has to be focused ruthlessly on what is known in Whitehall jargon as “delivery”. It’s time for a reset, and to return to that focus.
TO THAT end, it’s good that he is re-establishing the so-called Delivery Unit inside Downing Street, which Tony Blair set up but which David Cameron abolished. This will help enable the Government to gain a forward thrust, get us past this gossip and into action.
The Government will rightly be judged on its success or failure here and there’s an argument to be made that it’s time for a Cabinet reshuffle. There are ministers who were installed as gratitude for their support rather than for their skills in delivering results.
Post-pandemic, there can be no place for political favourites. It is vital that Boris Johnson returns to the spirit of December 2019 and gets on, once again, with the job of delivering results.
‘People like Boris despite – or even because of – his obvious flaws’