Trump derailed UK Covid crisis meetings with call demanding 'help to bomb Iraq', ex-BoJo aide reveals

A former aide to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has revealed that UK coronavirus efforts were sidetracked at the height of the pandemic, when then-president Donald Trump urged Britain to help him “bomb the Middle East”.

Johnson's former Chief Adviser, Dominic Cummings, made the revelation in an evidence-based committee session in Parliament on Wednesday, in which which he gave a damning account of the government's Covid strategy.

Cummings said the government was struggling to come up with a strategy to deal with the growing threat of the pandemic in March last year, when discussions were suddenly derailed by a phone call from Trump.

"Suddenly, the national security people came in and said, 'Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight', and we need to start having meetings about that through the day with Cobra as well," Cummings told members of Parliament, referring to the government's cross-departmental crisis committee (Cobra).

"So everything to do with Cobra that day on Covid was completely disrupted because you had these two parallel sets of meetings," Cummings said. "You had the national security people running in and out talking about, 'Are we going to bomb the Middle East?'"

At the time, the US was considering an attack on weapons facilities belonging to an Iran-backed militia, as part of a wider military campaign that began after US airstrikes killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January that year.

The #UK foreign secretary's visit came amid a fragile ceasefire between #Israel and #Hamas, after Israel's 11-day bombardment of the #Gaza Striphttps://t.co/f2LIyirfwa

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) May 27, 2021

It was at this time that the UK's Covid numbers were reaching new heights.

The World Health Organization in March 2020 found the global level risk of Covid to be “very high”; There were 23,335 covid deaths at that time, including 578 deaths in the UK.

"So, we have this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying, 'Are we going to bomb Iraq?', part of the building was arguing about whether or not we're going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the prime minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial"

In the UK, the accelerating number of deaths posed a serious problem, and at the end of March 2020, the government finally imposed a national lockdown.

"So, we have this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying, 'Are we going to bomb Iraq?', part of the building was arguing about whether or not we're going to do quarantine or not do quarantine, the prime minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial," Cummings said, referring to Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds and a news story about her and her dog.

“It sounds so surreal it couldn't possibly be true," he continued.