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According to the disgraced adviser, he managed only with great difficulty to prevent the prime minister from visiting the very elderly queen. “What are you going to do?” I asked him and he said ‘I’m going to the Queen’ and then I said ‘What the hell are you talking about, of course you can’t go to the Queen,'” Cummings said of his conversation with Johnson.
“He then said ‘this is what I do every Wednesday, fuck off, I’m going to her'” Cummings pointed out to Johnson the danger of his visit. “If you give her the coronavirus and she dies, what do you do? You can’t take that risk, that’s completely insane.” According to Cummings, Johnson came to his senses only after those words. “He said he just didn’t think about it and then said ‘Holy shit, I can’t go’.”
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Dominic Cummings
Ⓒ REUTERS
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Downing Street has denied that this conversation took place. A spokesman for the prime minister told the BBC that since the start of the pandemic, Boris Johnson has “taken all necessary precautions to protect lives”. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.
Lockdown
In the interview, Cummings reveals that Johnson opposed the imposition of a second lockdown last fall, joking that the virus “only killed the elderly after all.” The prime minister did not believe, Cummings’s scientific advisers, that Britain’s health care system was in danger of being overwhelmed.
It was Cummings’ first TV interview since his resignation in October last year. According to the former adviser, Johnson’s attitude during the pandemic was “a strange and partial mix of ‘it’s all bullshit and lockdowns don’t work anyway’ and ‘it’s terrible but the people who are dying are all over 80 and we can’t destroy the economy. for people over 80’”.
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