Ex-aide slams Boris
CLAIM: PUT HIS OWN POLITICAL INTERESTS AHEAD OF PEOPLE’S LIVES Johnson didn’t want 2nd lockdown as ‘most of those dying were aged over 80’.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to avoid a second lockdown last British autumn, arguing that most of those dying were over 80, according to his former aide-turned bitter foe Dominic Cummings.
In a BBC interview aired yesterday, the mastermind of Johnson’s anti-EU Brexit campaign said his former boss “put his own political interests ahead of people’s lives”.
In the latest of a series of attacks on the government following his resignation as chief Downing Street advisor in November, Cummings shared WhatsApp messages apparently from Johnson.
In one message shown by Cummings to the BBC, the prime minister allegedly wrote in October that most people were dying from the virus at an age above the average life expectancy.
“The median age is 82-81 for men 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and Live longer,” Johnson was said to have written in the text message.
The prime minister also apparently downplayed the pandemic’s impact on the National Health Service (NHS), despite himself receiving intensive care treatment for Covid last year.
“I no longer buy all this nhs overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate,” the WhatsApp message from 15 October says, two weeks before Johnson did in fact announce a second lockdown.
Cummings summarised Johnson’s attitude at the time as: “This is terrible but the people dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80.”
Business Minister Paul Scully defended the prime minister against the allegation that he was ready to sacrifice the over-80s to save the economy.
“I don’t think that’s right,” Scully told BBC radio, stressing he did not know whether the messages were genuine.
“The prime minister had some really difficult decisions to make. We want to protect people, we want to keep people safe... but that has to be balanced with people’s livelihoods.”
Johnson has faced serious criticism for vacillating at various stages of the health crisis, with the UK’s death toll soaring to the worst in Europe before a successful vaccine roll-out.
On Monday, he controversially opted to go ahead with the relaxation of almost all virus restrictions in England, despite cases growing steeply in recent weeks. Cummings also claimed that at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, he had to persuade Johnson not to continue meeting Queen Elizabeth II in person every week.
He claimed the prime minister said on 18 March: “Sod this. I’m going to go and see her.”
Johnson changed his mind after Cummings said he told him that some Downing Street staff were already infected and that risking the life of the monarch, then aged 94, was “completely insane”.
Downing Street denied this took place, while Buckingham Palace declined to comment, according to the BBC.
Johnson repeatedly condemned the first lockdown from March 2020 as a “disaster”, Cummings said.
The UK government lifted many virus restrictions over the English summer of 2020, including reopening nonessential shops, and encouraged people to “eat out to help out” at restaurants.
But as cases and hospitalisations soared after the summer, a new lockdown in England entered force on 31 October – more than a month after government scientists began pressing for one.
A high-profile figure during the pandemic, Cummings resigned in November 2020 after he became notorious for breaking the government’s strict lockdown rules with a family road trip.
He said MPs should insist on an immediate inquiry into Johnson’s decisions on the pandemic. The prime minister has promised one, but not before next year. –
PM had some really difficult decision to make