PM says public 'not interested' in comments about lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson plays table tennis during a visit to Wrexham - Credit: PA

Boris Johnson has claimed it is “total rubbish” that he allegedly made a remark suggesting they should let “the bodies pile high” over coronavirus rather than have a third lockdown.

He also claimed that the public was “not interested” in what was reported in the newspapers over the matter.

Talking to reporters, he said: “What I certainly think is that this country has done an amazing job with the lockdowns. And they’ve been very difficult. And they’ve been very tough for people. And there’s no question about that.

“Nobody wants to go into a lockdown but they’ve helped us. The discipline the public has shown has helped us to get the numbers of cases down very considerably.

“They were lower than 2,000, the numbers I saw this morning, admittedly they are weekend numbers, but the number of deaths, one is too many, but they were well, well down.

“I think that is partly thanks to the amazing determination of the British people in having lockdown.”

He suggested the public were not interested in reports on such comments.

He said: “I know why you’ve got to focus on this sort of stuff, but I really think, I really think that that is not where the public are, I’m talking to, today.

“What they want to hear about is our plans for jobs, growth, bouncing back, for delivering on the road map, going from the April the twelfth step to the May the seventeenth step, going through to June the twenty-first, what’s the world going to look like on June the twenty-first?

“To what extent are we really going to be powering through this?

“As things stand I think we’ve got a very good chance of really opening up totally on June the twenty-first.

“But we’ve got to be cautious and go on the data not the dates.

“I think that is what people are interested in. They are interested in that.”

Johnson was asked if he regretted bringing Dominic Cummings into his Number 10 operation.

He explained: “I think what people want to talk about here on this beautiful day in Wrexham is not that kind of thing, they want to talk about what we are doing for them.

“Our plans for Wales and the whole of the UK. It’s amazing to be here in Net World Sports, which is a company that has actually doubled the number of its employees during the pandemic.

“I have just personally helped to export a golf net to Australia, from Wrexham.

“What people want to know is what we are doing to promote jobs and growth to help this part of the UK to bounce back strongly.

“We are actually at the epicentre of the UK fightback against coronavirus.

“I think Wockhardt is not very far away from here at all, that is the factory where people have been working more or less around the clock to produce tens of millions of doses of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine that have been absolutely indispensable to our national fightback.”