Boris Johnson devised an extraordinary plan for British special forces to ‘invade’ Holland to seize vaccine supplies during Covid, he reveals in his bombshell political memoir.
In Unleashed, which is being serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, the former prime minister also tells for the first time how close he came to death from the pandemic and the full inside story of Partygate.
In today’s extracts, Mr Johnson recounts how – after two ‘futile’ months negotiating with the EU for the release of five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine being held in a Leiden warehouse – he summoned senior members of the Armed Forces to demand action.
Mr Johnson – infuriated that supplies of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which had been pioneered in the UK with British government support, had been ‘kidnapped’ by the EU – was told that forces could cross the Channel clandestinely and navigate up Dutch canals to liberate the vaccines.
Boris Johnson has written in extraordinary detail about how close he came to death from Covid
The former prime minister announcing he has tested positive for the virus in March 2020
The Halix plant in the Netherlands was a long-standing part of AstraZeneca’s supply chain
He ultimately agreed with advisers that mounting an invasion of a longstanding Nato ally would be ‘nuts’.
In the book, which is already being described as the political memoir of the century, he recounts in extraordinary detail how close he came to death from Covid, and claims that without the round-the-clock effort of two dedicated nurses he would have ‘carked it’.
In one of the many barbed references to Michael Gove which litter the book, Mr Johnson recounts the reaction of the former Cabinet minister when he raises the prospect that he could – like the Greek politician Pericles – die of ‘the plague’: ‘His spectacles seemed to glitter at the thought, like the Penguin in Wallace and Gromit’.
Mr Johnson, whose pregnant wife Carrie was also afflicted by Covid, tells how he initially ignored doctors’ advice to go to hospital, even though he was so ill he could barely walk, think or read.
After he was persuaded that it could ‘go either way’, he was taken into St Thomas’s hospital in a wheelchair, where he was soon admitted to intensive care. His fight to survive – he avoids sleep in case he doesn’t wake up – is described in compelling detail.
Mr Johnson recuperating at Chequers with dog Dilyn after being discharged from hospital
The former prime minister at a gathering for his birthday in 2020 – which led to a police fine
Mr Johnson receives his Covid vaccine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London in December 2021
Mr Johnson also recounts his convalescence at Chequers, the PM’s grace and favour country estate, and how even his dog Dilyn appeared to succumb to the disease: ‘he would lie there all floppy, tongue lolling’.
He says that Brexit allowed the UK to race ahead of the EU to became the first country in the world to approve and roll out an effective vaccine, Pfizer BioNTech.
In today’s extracts, he passionately defends his behaviour over Partygate, which lit the fuse towards his eventual ousting as prime minister.
He initially dismissed the first story about claimed breaches of Covid rules during a social gathering at No10 as ‘a load of old cobblers’ which was ‘probably some desperate nonsense being peddled by embittered former advisers’.
Of another event, which led to a police fine, he says: ‘I saw no cake. I ate no blooming cake’.
But he admits that he made ‘several catastrophic mistakes in the handling of the story’, including by initially apologising rather than robustly defending No10’s behaviour.
He also regrets ordering ‘a ridiculous and unfair witch-hunt’ by then-civil servant Sue Gray, who is now chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer.
Mr Johnson claims that Ms Gray’s political leanings are revealed by the fact that she had held discussions more than a decade ago to work for Ed Miliband when he was Labour leader.
Today’s extracts include hilarious pen portraits of Prime Minister Sir Keir, who is likened to ‘a bullock having a thermometer unexpectedly shoved in its rectum’ and former Tory prime minister Theresa May, who is said to display ‘schoolmarmy self-righteousness’.
He writes: ‘I was particularly fixated upon her nostrils – immensely long and pointy black tadpole shapes, like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon’.
He is scathing about then-US president Barack Obama’s intervention in the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016, when he said Britain would be at ‘the back of the queue’ for a trade deal.
Mr Johnson says that his choice of words (‘queue’ being British English for what Americans call the ‘line’)’ indicated that he had been ‘fed the script’ by then-prime minister David Cameron, who was backing the Remain campaign.
