Mr Johnson wrote that he had been infuriated that supplies of the
AstraZeneca vaccine, which were pioneered with British Government support, had been “kidnapped”.
The five million doses were stuck at the Halix plant in the Netherlands because it was a long-standing part of AstraZeneca’s supply chain.
After five weeks of negotiations, in March 2021 he brought in military top brass to ask “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”.
Lt Gen Doug Chalmers, the deputy chief of the defence staff, told him that such action was “certainly feasible”. “He explained how we could do it,” Mr Johnson wrote. “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.
“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… ‘If we are detected we will have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally.’“
The former prime minister concluded: “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.”
He said he had been desperate because he believed it was his “paramount duty” to secure vaccines while “
people in my country were dying of Covid”.
Mr Johnson accused the EU of “treating us with malice and with spite [because] we were vaccinating our population much faster than they were, and the European electorate had long since noticed”.
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