Boris Johnson never wanted tough border controls to prevent cases of coronavirus being brought in from overseas, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
The Prime Minister’s former adviser said Johnson wanted to be like the mayor from the film Jaws, who kept the beaches open to protect the local economy despite the threat posed by a killer shark.
Responding to questions from new SNP MP Anum Qaisar-Javed on borders, he told the Airdrie and Shotts MP : “Fundamentally, there was no proper border policy because the Prime Minister never wanted a proper border policy."
Cummings recalled: "We’re imposing all of these restrictions on people domestically but people can see that everyone is coming in from infected areas, it’s madness, it’s undermining the whole message that we should take it seriously.
“At that point he was back to, ‘lockdown was all a terrible mistake, I should’ve been the mayor of Jaws, we should never have done lockdown one, the travel industry will all be destroyed if we bring in a serious border policy’.
“To which, of course, some of us said there’s not going to be a tourism industry in the autumn if we have a second wave, the whole logic was completely wrong.”
Cummings said the border policy is still inadequate, partly because the Prime Minister was dealing with “Tory MPs going crackers about it”.
“We never won the argument,” he said.
“As of today, look at the whole thing about variants. We still don’t have a proper border policy in my opinion.”
