Senior Tories have solid doubt on Boris Johnson’s declare that he significantly thought-about invading the Netherlands to grab vaccines through the pandemic, saying the story had clearly been overblown and reheated to spice up gross sales of his memoirs.
The previous prime minister says in his new ebook, Unleashed, that he requested senior members of the armed forces about the potential for conducting an “aquatic raid” on a warehouse in Leiden in March 2021 with the intention to pay money for 5m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which he believed the EU didn’t need to be exported to the UK.
Johnson tells how he convened a gathering of navy “high brass” in Downing Road to be advised the way it might be accomplished with using RIBs (inflexible inflatable boats) that will navigate up canals “below the duvet of darkness”.
He writes that after being advised that it will not be attainable to do that “undetected” and that the UK would then have to clarify why it was invading a Nato ally, he, too, concluded that the plan was “nuts”.
Ministers who labored with Johnson stated they believed the plan was by no means significantly thought-about and that the previous prime minister might have put ahead such concepts largely as a joke, understanding he may later make the very most of them in his memoirs.
They famous that the supposed plan had by no means been talked about by the previous PM – or anybody else – in his proof below oath to the Covid inquiry.
One former Tory minister who was very carefully concerned with the pandemic response advised the Observer: “These had been instances of utmost strain when a lot of outlandish proposals had been put ahead, however the concept that we might invade a European neighbour was by no means on the desk.”
One other supply stated: “He has clearly introduced this one out of the bag for his ebook.”
The previous overseas workplace minister Alan Duncan, who was, in impact, Johnson’s deputy when he was overseas secretary, stated: “I doubt it was ever an actual proposal. However provided that issues had been so severe at the moment, even when it had been only a flight of fancy it’s actually relatively worrying.”
Within the newest extract from his memoirs, revealed within the Mail on Sunday as we speak, Johnson says he believes Covid was man-made in a Chinese language laboratory. “The terrible factor about the entire Covid disaster is that it seems to have been completely man-made, in all its features. It now appears overwhelmingly probably that the mutation was the results of some botched experiment in a Chinese language lab. Some scientists had been clearly splicing bits of virus collectively just like the witches in Macbeth.”
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Adapting Shakespeare’s phrases, he continues: “Eye of bat and toe of frog – and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the check tube and began replicating everywhere in the world.”
Johnson is predicted to earn as much as £4m from his memoirs.
