Britain’s top brass filed into my office in No 10, bearing with them hundreds of years of collective operational experience, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It was about 6pm, at the very end of March 2021, and after several days of deliberation they had reached a verdict.
They had seen sieges, firefights, hostage rescues and hairbreadth ‘scapes in the imminent deadly breach. It was clear from their manner, however, that they did not like the look of this one, Sarge.
It fell to the deputy chief of the defence staff (military strategy and operational), Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, to act as their spokesman. ‘Well, PM,’ he coughed, ‘it’s certainly feasible.’
He explained how we could do it. We would send one team on a commercial flight to Amsterdam, while another team would use the cover of darkness to cross the Channel in ribs (rigid inflatable boats) and navigate up the canals.
Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers and then Defence Secretary Philip Hammond in 2012
The Halix plant in the Netherlands was a long-standing part of AstraZeneca’s supply chain
They would then rendezvous at the target; enter; secure the hostage goods, exfiltrate using an articulated lorry, and make their way to the Channel ports.
‘But I have to warn you, PM’ – and they all looked at me meaningfully – ‘that it will not be possible to do this undetected.’ He pointed out that there were lockdowns in place in Belgium and the Netherlands, and the local authorities might observe our movements.
I considered this. It did not seem an insuperable objection. OK, I said: so what if our movements are detected?
‘Well, PM,’ he said, ‘if we are detected we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally.’
Of course, I knew he was right, and I secretly agreed with what they all thought but did not want to say aloud: that the whole thing was nuts.
I beg you to forgive my desperation. It was in the best possible cause. I 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.
Boris receives his Covid booster Jab at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital in December 2021
A nurse holds a phial of the Pfizer BioNTech Covid vaccine at Guy’s Hospital in London as the immunisation programme begins in December 2020
We had the people who could do the job – special units that we had stood up in early 2020, as soon as it became clear that there was going to be a global contest for life-saving kit such as PPE and ventilators. We knew exactly where the target was: I could see it on Google Earth. It looked pretty easy to burgle, if you know what to do.
It was the plant where the EU had stowed five million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine – doses that the company was trying, in vain, to export to the UK. As long as people in my country were dying of Covid, which I am afraid they still were in substantial numbers, I believed it was my paramount duty to secure those doses, which belonged to the UK, and use them to save UK lives.
I was angry enough to contemplate this clandestine operation, because after two months of futile negotiation I had come to the conclusion that the EU was treating us with malice and with spite; not because we had done anything wrong – we had not, far from it; but because we were vaccinating our population much faster than they were, and the European electorate had long since noticed.
Let me remind you that Oxford AstraZeneca was a vaccine that was pioneered in the UK, with UK government support.
The only reason that five million doses had been waylaid at the Halix plant in the Netherlands was that Halix was a long-standing part of AstraZeneca’s supply chain, and indeed the Dutch plant had been part-financed to the tune of £21 million by the UK government.
They had kidnapped our vaccines – but that wasn’t the real outrage.
The real cause of my pencil-snapping, bin-kicking rage was that the EU was playing dog in the manger. 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.
We worked our way through the UK population with a tightly organised plan by immediately protecting those most likely to die – those over 90, then those over 80, and so on; so that bit by bit, day by day, we were shrinking the numbers at risk.
People came forward in droves, rolling up their sleeves, taking off their shirts, fearlessly and proudly determined to protect themselves and everyone else.
The British don’t seem to have much fear of needles – it was Julius Caesar who noticed our love of tattoos – and soon the hypodermics were jabbing up and down across the country with the rapidity of a gigantic sewing machine.
By the end of January 2021 we had vaccinated about 10 per cent of the entire UK population, and a noticeable gap had opened up between the UK and the rest of Europe, who at this stage had done about 2 per cent.
The pace of the continental roll-out was not exactly helped, on January 29, when French president Emmanuel Macron announced that in his view the British AstraZeneca vaccine was ‘quasi-ineffective’ for anyone over 65. I don’t know where he got this idea, but it simply wasn’t true – as the European Medicines Agency confirmed.
Like Pfizer, Astra was about 80 per cent effective on dose one, and two doses gave you a very high degree of protection.
I was flabbergasted by Macron’s outburst. Why was he knocking confidence in our vaccine, when vaccine confidence was so precious and so vital across all our countries?
At the same time, out of the blue, the European Commission launched a kind of legal war against AstraZeneca, claiming that the company was failing to honour its contract with the EU.
Why, asked Brussels, are you giving priority to the Brits? Why are you giving them so many vaccines?
Well, said Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, it’s very simple. It’s because Kate Bingham (chair of the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce) signed a bomb-proof contract with us, and that contract makes it very clear that we have to supply the UK with the first 100 million doses. I knew that the EU’s complaints were nonsense, and that their real anxiety was political.
The problem was that after their initial slowness in approving both vaccines – they were about a month behind us on both – their roll-out was further hampered by the hesitancy of their public.
I don’t know why this was (I think I heard someone say that in general the French prefer suppositories, hence Macron’s attitude), but whatever the cause of the delay, the frustration of EU governments was, of course, being aggravated by the success of Brexit Britain.
So they announced that until AstraZeneca gave them more doses – of a vaccine they themselves disparaged as ‘quasi-ineffective’ for the people who needed it – they were going to stop the company from shipping its supplies to Britain.
Their purpose was not to use the vaccine themselves; clearly not, since they continually disparaged it. Their purpose was to stop us from using it and driving forward our roll-out.
On January 30, having already announced their blockade on the export of AstraZeneca vaccines to the UK, they went further. The Commission had noticed a chink in their perimeter fence.
Under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol there was, of course, no barrier to trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This was essential, as we all agreed, so that communities on both sides could continue to move and trade freely, with no new impediment as a result of Brexit.
Mindful of sensitivities in Northern Ireland, we in the UK Government had made it clear that we would never impose checks in Northern Ireland.
So on the evening of January 30, there was complete astonishment when the Commission invoked Article 16 of the protocol – an emergency clause designed for use in case of disaster or civil unrest – to impose a border in Northern Ireland.
They were going to impose checks at the border, to stop AstraZeneca from using the Northern Irish loophole to send us our drugs.
In other words, they were making a mockery of the Anglo-Irish peace process and violating the sanctity of a border-free island of Ireland in order to try to stop elderly and vulnerable people in Britain from getting hold of life-saving medicines.
Not because they really wanted those Halix doses themselves (I am not sure they ever got round to using them, not when they were in real demand), but because they wanted to do something, no matter how egregious, to put a spanner in the works of the British vaccine roll-out.
Why did they do it? They did it because they (and above all, I suspect, Macron) could not abide the impression in the continental media that the UK was doing better than them, not in spite of Brexit but because of Brexit.
When I rang Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to remonstrate, she was deeply embarrassed, and it was clear that she was acting under orders from the major member states.
‘Why are you stopping us from using our own vaccines?’ I asked. ‘It’s not our fault that the UK public is very keen to get vaccinated, and that our roll-out is going so fast.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you must not say that this is because of Brexit.’
‘Why not?’ I replied. ‘Everyone can see that Brexit has at least been helpful. Why can’t I say it?’
We both knew the answer to that. It was because for the past five years continental leaders, mainly Macron, had said that Brexit was a disaster, that it was based on lies, that I was a liar, that the British should be punished for Brexit, and that it should be made clear to the insolent Brits, over and over again, that they were worse off outside the EU than within – and then what happened?
Almost as soon as we were outside the EU, we were able to do something a little bit different in the regulation of medicines – a variation which, in that particular context, was able to make a huge difference to the survival prospects of a significant number of people in Britain.
The German population was so fed up with their glacial vaccine roll-out that Bild-Zeitung had run a front-page splash saying ‘Dear British, we envy you’.
That was why Macron, Merkel and co were freaking out; that was the politics of the row. It wasn’t about the Halix doses. It was about the prospect – so noisome to the EU – that we might actually be able to make a go of Brexit.
By the end of February, we had vaccinated 30 per cent of the UK population – as against 8 per cent in the EU. By the end of March, we had done 45 per cent, as against 10 per cent in the EU.
I am, of course, glad that we did not violently seize the Halix supplies, even though they were ours. The EU are our friends, and it would hardly have improved relations. But it still enraged me – in fact, it still does – that they were actually willing to let British people die rather than acknowledge the possibility that there might be an upside to Brexit.
Their conduct was cynical, shameful and dangerous to human health. I said as much to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who seemed to take the point. She then had the decency to get an AstraZeneca jab herself.
But they never did give us those Halix doses, and in the end we had to make do without.
Why I was fixated with Theresa May’s nostrils
I didn’t dislike Theresa May, not remotely. I enjoyed her schoolmarmy self-righteousness and watching her roll her eyes when I said something outrageous.
It seems weird, but I was particularly fixated upon her nostrils – immensely long and pointy black tadpole shapes, like a Gerald Scarfe cartoon, and the way she would twist her nose, as if to show them off.
What did it mean, this nose-twisting? Was it disgust? Or just reflection? What was she thinking?
One day she announced, in breathy vicar’s-daughter tones, that Penny Mordaunt had something very important to talk about. At which point Penny began a long disquisition about gender recognition, and the problems of British transsexuals in changing sex.
I didn’t catch all the details, but it seemed fairly harrowing stuff, and at one point I heard Penny claim: ‘This is the most important issue of our times.’
I didn’t always agree with Phil Hammond, but I happened at that moment to catch his eye and to see that he – like me – was struggling to contain his amusement.
I mean: I could see that this was an issue of huge importance to some people (though surely not that many?) and I could see that it needed to be handled with tact and sensitivity.
But ‘the most important issue of our times’? Really?
There was Theresa, nodding away enthusiastically at what was clearly a presentation organised and approved by No 10. So was she a Right-winger, or was she woke?
And as for Europe, to what extent – to borrow the language of Penny’s presentation – had she transitioned? Was she still a Remainer, wrapped in Brexiteer clothes, or had she surgically altered her beliefs?
Was she some kind of cross-dresser – and could she switch back? I started to worry.
