Boris Johnson denies making ‘let the bodies pile high’ comment over Covid lockdown
Boris Johnson has denied saying that he would rather see “bodies pile high in their thousands” than implement a third national lockdown.
The Prime Minister firmly denied the allegation in a broadcast interview this afternoon, after the explosive allegation was published by the Daily Mail yesterday.
A source close to Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove told the paper that Johnson said to a group of senior ministers last year, after agreeing to a second lockdown: “No more ****ing lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”
The Prime Minister did implement another national lockdown on 4 January.
Asked about whether he made the comment, Johnson said: “No, but again I think the important thing people want us to get on and do as a government is make sure the lockdowns work, and they have.
“I really pay tribute to the people of this country who have really pulled together and working with the vaccination programme we’ve got the disease under control.”
The Prime Minister’s spokesman also told journalists today that the story was not true.
Gove, who was in the room when the decision was made to implement a second lockdown, also vigorously denied the allegations in parliament today.
“We’re dealing with one of the most serious decisions a prime minister in any government has had to face, people had been pointing out quite rightly that tens of thousand of people were dying,” Gove said.
“The prime minister made a decision in that meeting to trigger the second lockdown, he made a subsequent decision to trigger a third lockdown, this is a prime minister who was in a hospital himself in intensive care.
“The idea he would say any such thing, I find incredible. I was in that room, I never heard language of that kind.”
Responding to the alleged comments, a Labour spokesperson said: “If this report is true, then these are truly shocking and sickening comments from Boris Johnson. It is hard to imagine how families who have lost loved ones to Covid will feel reading them. Boris Johnson must make a public statement as soon as possible.”
The leak comes amid a growing war between Johnson and his former chief aide Dominic Cummings.
The former Vote Leave mastermind posted on his blog on Friday that Johnson had fallen “so far below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserve”, while rebutting that he was the source of a leak about the Prime Minister’s contact with billionaire Sir James Dyson.
Downing Street blamed Cummings for the leak in three national newspapers, with The Sunday Times even reporting that Johnson briefed editors at the papers about it himself.
Cummings hit back with an explosive claim that the Prime Minister tried to block an inquiry of another leak last year because the expected perpetrator was Michael Gove aide Henry Newman – a close friend of Johnson’s fiancee Carrie Symonds.
Cummings also claimed that Johnson was in line to break the ministerial code of conduct if he got Tory donors to pay for the renovations of his Downing Street flat as he allegedly planned.
Cummings is expected to use a Westminster committee hearing next month to reveal private conversations and decisions made by the Prime Minister that may have exacerbated the UK’s Covid death toll – one of the highest in the world.
The Sunday Times reports that this may include voice recordings.