BORIS JOHNSON WAS ‘ABSOLUTELY DETERMINED’ TO CARRY ON AS PM SAYS LORD GRAHAM BRADY
BORIS Johnson was “absolutely determined” to continue as Prime Minister on the night before he resigned, according to the former chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee.
Lord Graham Brady told GB News: “…I’d just come from a meeting with Boris where I told him what I thought was going to happen, and he had been absolutely determined that he was going nowhere and he was going to fight on.
“And so at that point, I was just thinking, I don’t know how this is going to end, but it’s going to be messy.
“It was early the next morning that I had a phone call from Boris’s office, just saying, the Prime Minister wants to talk with you on the phone. He’ll call you in about an hour’s time.
“I think it was then 8.30 that Boris phoned me and said, the conversation we had last night, I’ve changed my mind.
“I think the logic and the pressure of events was such and at that point he was struggling to get people to serve as ministers in his government.”
He added: “I think what people tend to underestimate is or fail to recognise all the time, they are people and as human beings they’re all flawed. They all have their own frailties.
“Sir Keir Starmer is doing his best to remind us of that on a daily basis at the moment, making all of the former Conservative Prime Minister look better, with hindsight.
“They’re all very different people. I think David Cameron, obviously the first who was there. He carried it very lightly most of the time. He seemed very relaxed and took it in his stride until suddenly he didn’t.
“Then Theresa May, very proper, very dedicated to public service. She was determined to deliver the outcome of the referendum, but then called that 2017 general election, didn’t have the majority to do what she needed to do, and the pressure that then built on her was immense.
“So you see some of the consequences of that, which is both a consequence in public policy terms, we couldn’t do what we had to do, and the human consequence, both for her, for everybody in Parliament actually was the most awful, painful time.
“And then Boris comes in, determined just to smash through and get everything done and created his own problems.
“In my view, the covid restrictions were too complex and too restrictive, and he then ended up getting caught in his own Covid restrictions.”
