“Dinosaurs, asteroids and the Black Death” – Sir Graham Brady’s astonishing conversations with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the pandemic. 

One of the UK’s most influential politicians has revealed some of the astonishing conversations he had with former Prime Minister Boris Jonson during the Covid pandemic. 

Sir Graham Brady, former chair of the 1922 committee of backbench MP’s said Mr Johnson ‘flip flopped’ on policies according to ‘whoever he was with at the time.’ He added this ultimately led to his downfall and being ousted from the premiership.  

Sir Graham, who was instrumental in persuading his government to end the Covid restrictions in 2021 and who worked closely with Boris Johnson throughout the pandemic, said;

“Boris likes to please and to be loved – he agreed with whoever he was at the time in making his covid policy. I doubt anyone knows his real feelings and his favourite game was to guess what I was going to talk about.
“I had amazing conversations with him – for example when I went to see him asking him to lift restrictions in the summer of 2020. It had become obvious that we had a map of fluctuating levels of infections at the start of the pandemic leading to hospital admissions and admissions into intensive care. But I saw this was not happening after the first weeks of the Covid outbreak
“I was in touch with an eminent respiratory physician and he was mapping this and showing me the evidence that we were not seeing hospital admissions rise alongside infection rates and on that basis the whole lot of restrictions ceased to make sense once that link has been broken so I urged Boris Johnson to release restrictions.

Boris said:

“Maybe, this is just meant to be. Maybe it wasn’t just an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It might be the black death.” 

I said, “But this isn’t the Black Death,” and he agreed.

Sir Graham added:

“It occurred to me whenever he got with the government’s scientific advisors who were pushing for more restrictions he would just agree with them and when he sat with me he would agree with me. For example, I told him we needed to lift the restrictions to get the children back to school and he agreed. The following day he made a public announcement urging parents to get their children back to school and telling them it was safe. The very next day the schools closed. So the lack of consistency in that decision making process was all too apparent.”

He said his role as Chair of the committee of backbench MP’s meant he had many chances to talk to Mr Johnson:

“I had more opportunities to communicate with the Prime Minister because I was chairman of the 1922 committee, but fundamentally, I was acting as a member of parliament with a concern about what seemed to me to be a massive public policy error that was going on. It wasn’t in my remit as Chair of the 1922 committee but I thought it was morally wrong to take control of people’s lives without evidence that what was happening worked.”

He added:

“I’d seen very close up in my own constituency where very plain restrictions didn’t make any sense and they didn’t work. And then I started to look more into more detail of the medical evidence and talking to eminent scientists such as Professors Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta as well as respiratory experts and I got a very strong sense that what we were being told was being done because of something called ‘the science’ was, at the very least questionable, that there were alternative strands of thought, the damage that was being done in other aspects of life was very, very painfully obvious, that there was evidence that different approaches might have been better.”

He believes mistakes were made during the pandemic but fears lessons will not be learnt:

“We have a very serious problem in that the government has not admitted it was wrong on lockdown. We do expensive and time-consuming public inquiries in this country like the Covid Inquiry. It does not answer the questions I want to answer and the mantra that we were led by science is simply not true.”

Sir Graham Brady’s new book, Kingmaker, is released this month and published by Bonnier Books UK.