Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared to blame everyone but himself for his downfall in an hour-long interview – as he said it was a ‘mistake’ for Rishi Sunak to turn on him
Boris Johnson says ‘close friend’ Rishi Sunak ‘turned’ on him
Boris Johnson claimed it was “complete nonsense” to suggest he was an indecisive “shopping trolley” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The shameless ex-PM railed against claims from senior officials that he acted like a trolley constantly changing direction during the crisis. Instead, he moaned that it was a “terrible mistake” to oust him from No10 and that he is “absolutely convinced” if he stayed in power the Tories would have won the general election.
In an interview with GB News, Mr Johnson appeared to blame everyone but himself for his downfall. “There was an outbreak of irrationality in my party and I think they made the wrong calculation,” he said, hinting at the mass government resignations that forced him out the door during the summer of 2022.
He squirmed as he was asked about Rishi Sunak quitting as his Chancellor. Asked if Mr Sunak contributed to him being ousted as PM, Mr Johnson said: “He was a close colleague and friend who turned on me at a particularly critical time and I thought it was a mistake.”
Over the course of the last year, WhatsApp messages seen by the Covid Inquiry revealed Cabinet Secretary Simon Case thought Mr Johnson made the Government look like a “tragic joke” and that his indecisiveness made it “impossible” to govern.
Ex-adviser Dominic Cummings also branded Mr Johnson an indecisive “shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”. Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, criticised Mr Johnson’s “impossible flip-flopping” and “bipolar decision-making” in diary entries seen by the inquiry.
Asked about the shopping trolley analogy, Mr Johnson told GB News on Sunday: “I totally reject that because that’s total nonsense… complete nonsense. If you want examples of decisive action and getting things done, then look at what actually happened once the advisers you mentioned (Mr Cummings) had left No10, we began the vaccine rollout.”
Repeatedly pressed on whether he had regrets about his handling of the Covid crisis, Mr Johnson suggested his only problem was that he was too busy “fighting” the pandemic and did not give enough attention to MPs in his party.
“For 18 months I was trying to fight the pandemic and loads of MPs were sitting at home on their laptops and they were then getting a lot of abuse about me and stuff on social media, and understandably, a lot of colleagues started to fret,” he said. I think that the problem was really that I wasn’t able to go and put an arm around colleagues and reassure them about everything and I think they became very fractious.”
The ex-PM’s defence of his decisiveness comes after Mr Johnson said he regrets his decision to issue a “pathetic” and “grovelling” apology over Partygate in his new book, Unleashed. He has also tried to undermine Sue Gray’s investigation into Partygate by highlighting that she now works for Keir Starmer. Mr Johnson failed to point out that he was also investigated by the Metropolitan Police, who fined him for breaking lockdown rules in June 2020.
