Boris Johnson thought of an “aquatic raid” on a Dutch warehouse to grab Covid vaccines in the course of the top of the pandemic, he has revealed in his memoirs.
The previous prime minister mentioned plans with senior navy officers in March 2021, in keeping with an extract from his forthcoming e book, Unleashed, revealed within the Every 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 mentioned that he “had commissioned some work on whether or not it is perhaps 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 employees, Lt Gen Doug Chalmers, instructed the prime minister the plan was “actually 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 option to the Channel ports,” Johnson wrote.
Nevertheless, Chalmers instructed Johnson it might be troublesome to hold out the mission undetected, that means the UK would “have to elucidate 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 have a good time 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 mentioned, including that it “by no means occurred” to him or the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, that the Partygate birthday gathering was “not directly towards the foundations”.
He wrote: “Here’s what really 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 diverse members of employees mentioned 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 received over Covid. I didn’t sing. I didn’t dance.”
Downing Road beforehand admitted that employees “gathered briefly” within the Cupboard Room for what was reportedly a shock get-together for Johnson organised by his now-wife, Carrie.
Johnson turned the primary prime minister to obtain a legal 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.
Within the extracts from his autobiography, Johnson additionally mentioned he believed he “may need carked it” when he was in intensive care with Covid with out the “expertise and expertise” of his nurses.
Johnson spent a number of days in intensive care with Covid in April 2020. He described not wanting to go to sleep on his first night time in intensive care “partly in case I by no means wakened”.
Following his launch from hospital, the then prime minister spent a while at Chequers together with his now-wife Carrie, and he recalled becoming a member of in with the clap for the NHS on a Thursday night.
“I clapped with deep emotion as a result of my lungs had been telling me that I had been by way of one thing actually fairly nasty, and that if it hadn’t been for [his nurses] Jenny and Luis, twiddling with these oxygen tubes all night time with all their talent and expertise, I feel I may need carked it,” he wrote.
On his admission to ICU, Johnson mentioned he “began to doze, however didn’t wish to sleep – partly in case I by no means wakened, or in case they determined to carry out some stealthy tracheotomy with out letting me know”.
