Donald Trump coronavirus response 'more credible' than Boris Johnson's, says Piers Morgan

Good Morning Britain's Piers Morgan. Photograph: ITV. - Credit: Archant

Piers Morgan has slammed Boris Johnson’s coronavirus response, claiming his decisions made Donald Trump look ‘credible’.

In a Daily Mail column penned by Morgan, the Good Morning Britain presenter criticised Johnson’s first press conference since time spent in hospital, claiming he failed to get a grip on the virus in its early days.

He also said that Johnson’s decisions had made US president Donald Trump look more credible.

He wrote: ‘I didn’t think it would be possible for any world leader in this crisis to sound more delusional than Trump, whose antics at his own daily briefings have become an unedifying masterclass in how not to handle a pandemic.

‘But Boris managed to make Trump seem almost credible, and his sycophantic loyalists on social media lapped it up.

”That’s our guy!’ they drooled as Boris informed us in no uncertain terms that we’re going to get this virus done, just as he got Brexit done. But the virus isn’t like Brexit.’

MORE: Like him or loathe him, Piers Morgan has been right about coronavirus

Since March, the government has introduced a raft of measure to curb the spread of covid-19 including social distancing and a shutdown of shops and businesses.

Johnson asserted the measures had been ‘successful’ in bringing down transmission rates to below 1.0, meaning for every person infected, only one other could catch the disease rather than more.

But Morgan was not impressed, labelling the government response ‘scandalous’ and Johnson’s claims ‘utter bullshit’.

He said: ‘We were scandalously slow and complacent in our response to its outbreak. We were scandalously under-prepared for it, particularly when it came to stock-piling Personal Protection Equipment for health workers and securing enough coronavirus tests as soon as the severity of the crisis became clear.

‘We were scandalously late to order a lockdown. We were scandalously complicit in sending infected elderly hospital patients back to care homes without testing them. And we’ve been scandalously inconsistent in performing policy U-turn after policy U-turn.’

Morgan added that because the UK was on course to have one of the highest coronavirus death rates in Europe, any semblance of the government being successful in containing the virus were ‘a woeful delusion.’

Deaths in care homes and the wider community have now been added to daily statistics, bringing the total number of those who have died to 26,771. A further 427 people were added to that figure on Friday.

In other developments, chief medical officer Chris Whitty claimed the government’s 100,000-a-day testing target had not been based on specific scientific advice.