Cummings: PM wanted to visit Queen during Covid outbreak

●Ex-adviser says Johnson resisted lockdown as only over-80s were dying

Boris Johnson wanted to visit the Queen in person early in the pandemic – despite Downing Street staff already falling ill with Covid-19, Dominic Cummings has claimed.

A series of explosive messages released by the former chief aide in No 10 alleged that he had to convince the Prime Minister not to visit her by warning about the potentially grave consequences. Downing Street denied the incident – described by Mr Cummings in an interview with the BBC – took place. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

Mr Cummings shared a host of Whatsapp exchanges which reportedly showed the Prime Minister saying in October 2020 that he did not “buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff ” and suggested people “get Covid and live longer” because most deaths occur in elderly patients.

The messages appeared to have been sent from Mr Johnson’s number

to aides on 15 October – the month which saw the UK death toll exceed 60,000 and weeks ahead of the Prime Minister being forced to announce another national lockdown.

Mr Johnson ended up taking a 15-month break from his face-to-face weekly audience with the Queen after meeting her on 11 March, 2020 and they instead spoke on the phone.

But Mr Cummings – who has been engaged in a war of words with Mr Johnson since leaving No 10 in November – alleged the PM wanted to visit her a week later, on 18 March.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to see the Queen’ and I said, ‘What on Earth are you talking about, of course you can’t go and see the Queen’,” Mr Cummings said in an interview to be broadcast this evening.

“He said, ‘Ah, that’s what I do every Wednesday. Sod this, I’m gonna go and see her’.”

This was five days before Mr Johnson announced the first lockdown on 23 March. He went on to test positive for Covid-19 later that month.

Mr Cummings said: “I said to him [Boris Johnson], ‘There’s people in this office who are isolating, you might have coronavirus, I might have coronavirus, you can’t go and see the Queen’.

“I just said, ‘If you give her coronavirus and she dies what, what are you gonna do, you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane.’

“He basically just hadn’t thought it through. He said, ‘Yeah, holy shit, I can’t go’.”

Other messages appear to show Mr Johnson pushing back against the idea of a second lockdown.

The messages read: “I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The median age is 82 to 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 per cent) and of those virtually all survive.

“There are max 3m [three million people] in this country aged over 80. It shows we don’t go for nationwide lockdown.”

He accused Mr Johnson of “put[ting] his own political interests ahead of people’s lives”.

A No 10 spokesman told the BBC the PM had always “taken the necessary action to protect lives and livelihoods”.