IT’S COME TO THIS: UK ex-PM Boris Johnson says he planned raid on Dutch factory to get COVID vaccines.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he ordered military chiefs to plan a raid on a Dutch factory in March 2021 to secure 5 million COVID vaccines that the European Union had threatened to bar from being exported to Britain.
Johnson said the deputy chief of Britain’s defence staff at the time, Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, had told him a raid using small boats to cross the Channel and navigate Dutch canals would be possible – but warned him of diplomatic repercussions.According to Johnson, Chalmers – who has since retired from the military – told him it would not be possible to carry out the mission undetected and that “if we are detected we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing NATO ally”.
“I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts,” Johnson said in an extract from his memoirs that was published in Saturday’s Daily Mail newspaper.
As the London Spectator notes: Boris Johnson has just proven he was unfit to be prime minister.
For the past five years, I have been in something of a conflict: was Boris Johnson an unconventional but essentially wise prime minister whose ability to see the big picture was more important than his weakness on detail, and whose gift for spreading optimism outweighed his disorganisation? Or was he, as his many detractors have argued, simply not up to the job of leading the country? Fortunately, Johnson has now answered the question himself. Yes, he was stark-ravingly unsuited to being prime minister.
True, he does say that, after calling in military chiefs, he quickly dismissed the idea of launching a military raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands in order to spirit off doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which he believed were being wrongly withheld from Britain. But the fact that he considered it in the first place should send a shudder through all of us. Did he not immediately think through the consequences of invading a neighbouring democratic and – for the most part – friendly country? It would have atom-bombed a taboo which has been in place in Europe since 1945: that western democracies do not invade each other; they sort out their differences by diplomatic means. Britain’s relations with the EU were already at a low point following the drawn-out Brexit process. A raid on the Netherlands wouldn’t just have poisoned them further; it would have established Britain with a reputation as a rogue state.
As Jason Garshfield wrote in 2022 at the American Conservative:
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
Yes, but the cocktail parties were brilliant!
In other BoJo news: Equalities Minister in Theresa May’s cabinet]
The ex-PM wrote: “At which point Penny began a long disquisition about gender recognition, and the problems of British transsexuals in changing sex.
“I didn’t catch all the details, but it seemed fairly harrowing stuff, and at one point I heard Penny claim: ‘This is the most important issue of our times’.
“I didn’t always agree with Phil Hammond, but I happened at that moment to catch his eye and to see that he – like me – was struggling to contain his amusement.
“I mean: I could see that this was an issue of huge importance to some people (though surely not that many?) and I could see that it needed to be handled with tact and sensitivity.
“But ‘the most important issue of our times?’ Really?”
To be fair, we know what BoJo’s considers the most important issue of our time. In 2021, the former motoring journalist “spelt out the revolt against modernity that lies at the heart of climate-change alarmism when he used his speech at COP to complain about the invention of the steam engine. That contraption, which gave rise to the Industrial Revolution itself, was a ‘doomsday device’ that started the clock ticking on the eco-calamity we currently face, he madly said. And this is a PM who claims to stand up for British history and British greatness.”