Johnson said Lieutenant General Doug Chalmers, the UK’s deputy chief of staff at the time, told him a raid using a small fleet of ships to cross the English Channel and then sail through the Dutch canals was possible, but warned him it would have diplomatic repercussions.
Johnson said Chalmers, now retired, told him it was impossible for the mission to go undetected and that "if it was detected, we would have to explain why we were invading a long-standing ally in NATO." In excerpts from his memoirs published in the Daily Mail on Saturday, Johnson said: "I secretly agree with all their thinking but I don't want to say it out loud.
It's madness." The UK Ministry of Defence has not yet commented on the matter, while a spokesman for Chalmers, who now chairs the government's Committee on Standards for Citizens, said he could not comment on confidential security conversations. The Covid-19 vaccine in question is one developed by the UK's Oxford University and AstraZeneca, but it was manufactured by contractors in the Netherlands and the UK.
In March 2021, it was widely used in the UK, but its production in the Netherlands is still awaiting EU approval.
Both the UK and the EU have contracts with AstraZeneca for the vaccine. And the EU has sought to block the export of finished vaccines produced at a factory in the Netherlands for future use within the bloc.
Johnson believes EU officials acted under pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron. "After two months of futile negotiations, I have come to the conclusion that the EU is treating us with a vengeance because we are vaccinating our citizens at a much faster rate than they are," he said.