Britain’s Covid-19 pandemic priority: economy or elderly

Boris Johnson told Downing Street aides last year that he was opposed to an autumn lockdown because the vast majority of ­people dying were aged over 80, leaked messages reveal.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Picture: AFP

Boris Johnson told Downing Street aides last year that he was opposed to an autumn lockdown because the vast majority of ­people dying were aged over 80, leaked messages reveal.

In the latest salvo against the British Prime Minister, former senior aide Dominic Cummings released No. 10 WhatsApp messages that appeared to show Mr Johnson questioning whether the economic disruption lockdown would cause was worth it to save the lives of the elderly.

He also told staff that “I no longer buy all this NHS (National Health Service) overwhelmed stuff” adding: “Folks, I think we may need to recalibrate.” The messages were given by Mr Cummings to the BBC as part of an interview with the broadcaster.

Sent in mid-October, one said: “I must say I have been slightly rocked by some of the data on Covid fatalities. The ­median age is 82 – 81 for men, 85 for women. That is above life ­expectancy. So get Covid and live longer. Hardly anyone under 60 goes into hospital (4 per cent) and of those virtually all survive.”

Another pointed out there were “max 3 million in this country aged over 80” with another adding: “It shows we don’t go for nationwide lockdown.”

The messages are the first corroboration of claims by Mr Cummings that Mr Johnson was increasingly prepared to let the death toll from Covid rise to prevent a second lockdown.

However, Mr Johnson was persuaded to shut down the economy, first in November and then again in January, as a result of the Kent variant.

In an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, Mr Cummings said that he had to stop the Prime Minister going to see the Queen in person at the start of the pandemic, when people in Downing Street had already fallen ill.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘I’m going to see the Queen’ and I said, ‘What on earth are you talking about, of course you can’t go and see the Queen’. He said, ‘Ah, that’s what I do every Wednesday, sod this, I’m gonna go and see her’.”

“I said to him, ‘There’s people in this office who are isolating, you might have coronavirus, I might have coronavirus, you can’t go and see the Queen. What if you go and see her and give the Queen coronavirus? You obviously can’t go.’ I just said, ‘If you give her coronavirus and she dies what … what are you gonna … you can’t do that, you can’t risk that, that’s completely insane. And he said, he basically just hadn’t thought it through. He said, ‘Yeah, holy shit, I can’t go.’”

Mr Cummings said that Mr Johnson’s attitude to a second lockdown was driven by his ­belief that only the elderly were dying. “His attitude at that point (northern autumn 2020) was a weird mix of, er, partly it’s all nonsense and lockdowns don’t work anyway and partly, well this is terrible but the people who are dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80,” Mr Cummings said.

“Lots of people heard the Prime Minister say that. The Prime Minister texted that to me and other people. When you get to the week of around about 15th to the 19th of September, by that point the data was clear about what was happening and (chief scientific adviser) Patrick Vallance and (chief medical officer) Chris Whitty came to Downing Street and said it’s clear where this is going, we think that you should consider hitting it hard and early … The Prime Minister said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m not doing it.’ He put his own political interests ahead of people’s lives for sure.”

The Times