Former prime minister Boris Johnson considered launching an “aquatic raid” on a warehouse in the Netherlands to retrieve Covid vaccine doses amid a row with Europe, according to an extract from his memoir.
Mr Johnson convened a meeting of senior military officials in March 2021 to discuss the plans, which he admitted were “nuts”, according to an extract from his Unleashed book published in the Daily Mail.
At the time, the AstraZeneca vaccine was at the heart of a cross-Channel row over exports, with the EU lagging behind the pace of the rollout in the UK.
The extract says the deputy chief of the defence staff (military strategy and operations), Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, told the prime minister the plan was “certainly feasible”, using rigid inflatable boats to navigate Dutch canals.
“They would then rendezvous at the target; enter; secure the hostage goods, exfiltrate using an articulated lorry, and make their way to the Channel ports,” Mr Johnson wrote.
But the senior officer said it would not be possible to do this undetected, with lockdowns meaning the authorities might observe the raid, meaning the UK would “have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally”.
Writing in his book, Mr Johnson said he “had commissioned some work on whether it might be technically feasible to launch an aquatic raid on a warehouse in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and to take that which was legally ours and which the UK desperately needed”.
The former PM admitted: “Of course, I knew he was right, and I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.”
He described the Halix plant as holding millions of doses of the vaccine which AstraZeneca was “trying, in vain” to export to the UK. He believed the EU was treating the UK “with malice and with spite” due to the European rollout being slower than in the UK.
“They wanted to stop us getting the five million doses, and yet they showed no real sign of wanting to use the AstraZeneca doses themselves,” Mr Johnson wrote.
He said that around that time, “out of the blue, the European Commission launched a kind of legal war against AstraZeneca, claiming that the company was failing to honour its contract with the EU”.
However, he said the EU’s “complaints were nonsense” as a result of Kate Bingham, the chairwoman of the UK’s vaccine taskforce, signing a “bomb-proof” contract with AstraZeneca.
In March 2021, Mr Johnson told a Downing Street press conference: “We’ll continue to work with European partners to deliver the vaccine rollout.
“All I can say is we in this country don’t believe in blockades of any kind of vaccines or vaccine materials.
“It’s not something that this country would dream of engaging in and I’m encouraged in some of the things I’ve heard from the continent in the same sense.”
