Boris Johnson has said doctors prepared to announce his death as he battled coronavirus in intensive care.
The revelation comes as the Prime Minister and his fiance Carrie Symonds announced that they named their baby boy Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson after two doctors who saved his life.
The PM first said he tested positive for Covid-19 on March 27 before entering his mandatory period of self-isolation at home.
Due to his symptoms persisting, Mr Johnson was taken to St Thomas' Hospital in London on April 5. Just hours later, he was admitted to intensive care.
The PM returned to Downing Street on Monday but he has now revealed that during his time in the ICU doctors were making "arrangements" in case he did not recover.
He told the Sun On Sunday: “It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it. They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario.
“I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place.
“The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong.
“They gave me a face mask so I got litres and litres of oxygen and for a long time I had that and the little nose jobbie.”
Mr Johnson told the paper “the bloody indicators kept going in the wrong direction” and that he kept asking himself: “How am I going to get out of this?”
He said: “It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent. I remember feeling frustrated. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better.
“But the bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe.
“That was when it got a bit . . . they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.”
He said he was “in denial” initially about how serious his illness was, and said doctors were right to “force” him to go to St Thomas’s where he spent three nights in intensive care.
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