British Prime Minister Boris Johnson skipped five early crisis meetings on the coronavirus.
Johnson, who recently was released from the hospital after contracting the virus, snubbed the meetings as he dealt with the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, a Cabinet shake-up, mass flooding, and took a vacation with his fiancée, according to the Sunday Times of London.
Warnings about the virus in January and February fell on “deaf ears,” the report said.
The government held its first crisis briefing on Jan. 24 as the virus spread from China to at least six other countries. At the time, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the risk to the public was “low,” and a spokesperson for Johnson said the country was “well prepared for any new diseases.”
Johnson skipped four more meetings, attending his first one on March 2.
“He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be,” a senior adviser to Downing Street told the newspaper.
Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said it’s typical for a prime minister to miss the crisis briefings and that whoever leads the meetings updates Johnson.
“The prime minister is aware of all of these decisions and takes some of those decisions,” Gove told the Guardian. “You can take a single fact, wrench it out of context, whip it up in order to create a j’accuse narrative. But that is not fair reporting.”
“The idea that the Prime Minister skipped meetings that were vital to our response to the coronavirus, I think is grotesque,” he further told Sky News on Sunday. “The truth is that there were meetings across government, some of which were chaired by the Health Secretary, some by other ministers, but the Prime Minister took all major decisions.”
