Boris Johnson thought of an “aquatic raid” on a Dutch warehouse to grab Covid vaccines in the course of the peak of the pandemic, he has revealed in his memoirs.
The previous prime minister mentioned plans with senior navy officers in March 2021, based on an extract from his forthcoming e-book, Unleashed, revealed within the Each day Mail.
The AstraZeneca vaccine was, on the time, on the coronary heart of a cross-Channel row over exports, and Johnson believed the EU was treating the UK “with malice”.
Johnson stated that he “had commissioned some work on whether or not it could be technically possible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, within the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately wanted”.
The deputy chief of the defence workers, Lt Gen Doug Chalmers, advised the prime minister the plan was “definitely possible” and would contain utilizing inflexible inflatable boats to navigate Dutch canals.
“They’d then rendezvous on the goal; enter; safe the hostage items, exfiltrate utilizing an articulated lorry, and make their method to the Channel ports,” Johnson wrote.
Nevertheless, Chalmers advised Johnson it might be tough to hold out the mission undetected, which means the UK would “have to clarify why we’re successfully invading a longstanding Nato ally”.
Johnson concluded: “After all, I knew he was proper, and I secretly agreed with what all of them thought, however didn’t wish to say aloud: that the entire thing was nuts.”
Elsewhere within the revealed extracts, Johnson denied consuming cake at what he described because the “feeblest occasion within the historical past of human festivity” held to rejoice his 56th birthday in the course of the Covid lockdown.
He didn’t see or eat any cake on the occasion on 19 June 2020, he stated, including that it “by no means occurred” to him or the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, that the Partygate birthday gathering was “ultimately towards the foundations”.
He wrote: “Here’s what truly occurred that day. I stood briefly at my place within the Cupboard Room, the place I’ve conferences all through the day, whereas the chancellor and various members of workers stated completely happy birthday.
“I noticed no cake. I ate no blooming cake. If this was a celebration, it was the feeblest occasion within the historical past of human festivity. I had solely simply acquired over Covid. I didn’t sing. I didn’t dance.”
Downing Avenue beforehand admitted that workers “gathered briefly” within the Cupboard Room for what was reportedly a shock get-together for Johnson organised by his now-wife, Carrie.
Johnson grew to become the primary prime minister to obtain a felony penalty whereas in workplace over Partygate, though an investigation by the previous senior civil servant Sue Grey discovered that neither Johnson nor Sunak was conscious of the occasion prematurely.
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