Boris Johnson considered raiding warehouse over vaccines row, according to memoir

Former prime minister Boris Johnson considered launching an “aquatic raid” on a warehouse in the Netherlands to retrieve Covid vaccine doses amid a row with Europe, according to an extract from his memoir.

Mr Johnson convened a meeting of senior military officials in March 2021 to discuss the plans, which he admitted were “nuts”, according to an extract from his Unleashed book published in the Daily Mail.

At the time, the AstraZeneca vaccine was at the heart of a cross-Channel row over exports, with the EU lagging behind the pace of the rollout in the UK.

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The extract says the deputy chief of the defence staff (military strategy and operations), Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, told the prime minister the plan was “certainly feasible”, using rigid inflatable boats to navigate Dutch 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,” Mr Johnson wrote.

But the senior officer said it would not be possible to do this undetected, with lockdowns meaning the authorities might observe the raid, meaning the UK would “have to explain why we are effectively invading a long-standing Nato ally”.

Writing in his book, Mr Johnson said he “had ­commissioned some work on 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”.

The former PM admitted: “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 described the Halix plant