At her age and with her vulnerability (she was said to have been living with multiple myeloma for a few years), she really could have been a goner. Can you imagine?
[QUOTE]Downing Street, March 18, 2020 — two days after Boris Johnson made his first Covid statement asking people to stop non-essential contact with others. In the late afternoon, he instructs his private secretary, Martin Reynolds, to get the prime ministerial car ready for his weekly audience with the Queen. However, Johnson has a cough, and Reynolds and others are worried that he might have Covid and if he goes to the Palace, he will give it to the Queen. “He hadn’t been diagnosed, but he very obviously had it,” says a source. “We had to physically stop him going over.” Reynolds told Cleo Watson, the deputy chief of staff, to go and get Dominic Cummings, because he was the one person who could force Johnson not to go.
[QUOTE]In Cummings’s version of events, he asked Johnson what he was doing. Johnson replied he was going to see the Queen. “That’s what I do every Wednesday. Sod this, I’m gonna go and see her.” Cummings told the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg, “I just said, ‘If you give her coronavirus and she dies, what are you gonna do? You can’t do that; you can’t risk that. That’s insane.’ ”
[QUOTE]Another source tells of Cummings using a slightly pithier appeal to the prime minister: “You will f***ing kill the Queen. Are you f***ing mad?”
[QUOTE]They conducted the audience over the phone. It was just as well, said Young, because by the end of the call the prime minister was coughing persistently. Just over a week later, Johnson announced that he had tested positive for Covid.