Piers Morgan took to Twitter to slam Boris Johnson’s live-streamed excuse for not being able to provide messages from his phone at the start of the pandemic. As the Covid enquiry kicked off in Paddington, the former Conservative Prime Minister was quizzed with the words: “Do you know why your phone was missing those 5,000-odd Whatsapps?”
Johnson, who’d arrived at the enquiry three hours early – reportedly to avoid a run-in with protestors who were angry about his handling of the pandemic – replied: “I don’t know the exact reason.” Stammering, he continued: “It looks as though it’s something to do with the app going down and then coming up again, but somehow automatically erasing all the things between that date when it went down and the moment when it was last backed up.”
Johnson had handed over his devices and requested that the enquiry “urgently disclose” their contents so that he could clear his name – but not one single Whatsapp message from the required period seems to have survived. Acknowledging this, he explained: “I can’t give you the technical information, but that’s the best I’m able to do.”
Piers dismissed his comments by reposting video footage of them with a single word attached: “B*******.” It’s not the first time the TalkTV presenter has been openly critical about the former PM, either, with one of his Instagram posts from last year showing a photo of the Queen sitting miserable, masked up and totally alone, at Prince Philip’s funeral.
“REMINDER: Boris Johnson made the Queen sit alone at her husband’s funeral, just as he separated so many families in their darkest moments in this pandemic,” Piers wrote in his caption. “Yet all the time he and his staff were brazenly ignoring their own rules with endless illegal parties at No10.
“Just outrageous hypocrisy and a disgusting slap in the teeth to everyone, like Her Majesty, who followed the rules at often great personal sacrifice.
“That’s why this scandal is now rightly pushing the Prime Minister towards a political cliff edge. His authority has been destroyed at the altar of shameful double standards.”
Meanwhile, during the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC said a technical report provided by Mr Johnson’s solicitors suggested there may have been a factory reset at the end of January 2020 followed by an attempt to reinstate the contents in June 2020.
However, Johnson replied that he did not “remember any such thing”.
He’d resigned as PM last year following a Commons committee report which found that he had “misled” Parliament.
However, this week he clarified that he was “not sure” whether Government decision-making had been responsible for excess deaths during the pandemic.
“Irrespective of Government action, we have an elderly population, extremely elderly population. We do suffer, sadly, from lots of Covid-related comorbidities and we are a very, very densely populated country. That did not help,” he stated.
He had also previously stated that there were “unquestionably” things that should have been done differently, and that “mistakes” were made while trying to “balance appalling harms on either side of the decision”.
Meanwhile, Piers was forced to host his Uncensored show from his own home yesterday for the first time ever, after coming down with “raging Covid”.
“Thanks to an incredible effort by the @piersmorganuncensored team (who had 4hrs notice after I tested positive) and some great guests who did most of the talking (Prof Niall Ferguson, @konstantinkisin @avasantina) we got through it OK,” he explained via Instagram.
