Boris Johnson considered raiding Dutch warehouse during pandemic to retrieve COVID-19 vaccines

Boris Johnson claims he considered authorising a raid on a warehouse in the Netherlands during the pandemic to retrieve COVID-19 vaccines.

In his upcoming memoir, he described meeting senior military officials in March 2021 to discuss the plans, which he admitted were “nuts”.

Another extract from his upcoming book, released by the Daily Mail, describes Mr Johnson trying to convince the Duke of Sussex not to move to the United States.

He said Downing Street and Buckingham Palace asked him to speak to Prince Harry in January 2020, hours after announcing he and his wife Meghan planned to step away from royal life.

According to Mr Johnson, who was prime minister at the time, there was “a ridiculous business… when they made me try to persuade Harry to stay. Kind of manly pep talk. Totally hopeless”, the Daily Mail reported.

The men met for 20 minutes on the sidelines of a UK-Africa investment summit in London’s Docklands.

Meanwhile, the latest extract describes Mr Johnson writing about a point during the pandemic when AstraZeneca was “trying, in vain” to export the vaccine to the UK from Holland.

At the time, the AstraZeneca jabs were at the heart of a cross-Channel row over exports.

He wrote 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”.

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He believed the EU was treating the UK “with malice and with spite” due to the European rollout being slower than in the UK.

The extract says military chiefs told Mr Johnson the plan was “certainly feasible”, using rigid inflatable boats to navigate Dutch canals.

But the senior officer said the UK would “have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally”.

“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.