Boris Johnson will address the Partygate scandal that ended his term as Prime Minister when he appears on Friday Night with Nadine this week.
In a first-look clip from Nadine Dorries' interview set to air on Friday night, they also discuss Brexit and Johnson attempts to defend breaking the Covid rules in place in 2021.
The former PM suggests he and others in parliament "thought they were within the rules" when they attended gatherings at a time where strict social distancing measures were in place.
Johnson resigned in July 2022, after months of backlash and facing calls to step down as Prime Minister - even from members of his own party.
The Mirror revealed all on Johnson's lockdown partying, after it emerged a number of gatherings were held a No10 and by MPs during a time where the public were told to follow strict coronavirus guidelines.
In the chat, Johnson suggests they had no idea their actions were against the rules, the very same rules his government had laid out.
He says: “As you know there’s a Parliamentary Committee looking into some aspects of this and I had better be respectful of them.
"But I’ll just repeat what I've said before, and I hope it's obvious to everybody, that anybody who thinks I was knowingly going to parties that were breaking lockdown rules in Number 10, and then knowingly covering up parties that were illicit that other people were going to, that’s all strictly for the birds. And if anybody thinks like that they’re out of their mind.”
He adds: “I’ve got to wait for this thing to conclude. What I would say is that we all thought what we were doing - or certainly, I thought what we were doing - was within the rules. And what we certainly thought was that we were working blindingly hard on some massive priorities for the country.
“So what we were doing was getting that vaccine rollout organised. We were thinking desperately about how to… went through lots of phases. How to ramp up testing, and all the rest of it.”
He also claims that "Brexit helped save lives", suggesting "the MHRA, the medical health regulation agency, was now totally free to decide how fast to approve the vaccine" as the UK had "come out of the European Medicines Agency".
Johnson says: "Thank goodness that era is behind us but one thing people forget - now let’s pray it’s behind us - but one thing people forget, thinking about the vaccine rollout is there we’ve got the, I think the third anniversary of Brexit, coming up, or the third anniversary of the day when we actually came out of the EU.
"You don’t hear it much these days, but it is absolutely the case, that had it not been for our ability to do our own regulation, had it not been for the fact that we’d come out of the European Medicines Agency, the MHRA, the medical health regulation agency, was now totally free to decide how fast to approve the vaccine - we wouldn't have been able to do that vaccine rollout so fast.
“And you know, it is literally true that Brexit helped save lives. And people’s eyes bulge a bit when you say that, but it happens to be true… I'm proud of that. I’m proud of all the work that those people did.”
Friday Night with Nadine airs Friday on TalkTV at 8pm.
