Boris Johnson makes admission about shaking hospital patients' hands in March 2020

Transcript

00:00 That was not so. But I want to ask you, the weekend before you had received the draft action plan,

00:07 the contained delay document, which you had been shown in draft form, and in that document there is that assertion,

00:15 'We are well prepared and we have plans in place', etc. Do you think you told the world that we were well prepared on the 3rd

00:25 because you had seen it in that action plan, the draft of which you had been reading over the weekend?

00:31 Yes, this is the weekend of the 28th of February, 1st of March. Was there a leap year? Was there a 29th?

00:40 I really do not know, Mr Johnson. I cannot assist you with that.

00:45 It is certainly true that the general reassurances I was getting were that we were well prepared.

01:01 So the scales had not yet fallen about, for instance, tests and trace.

01:07 Indeed. And you shook hands with patients at the Royal Free Hospital on the 1st of March.

01:14 You know that, of course, you were later criticised for that. May we take it that you had not seen,

01:20 or at least you had not been advised of the contents of the SPI-B paper of around that time?

01:26 In fact, the paper came later, on 3rd March, but advice was given generally before that,

01:32 advising against greeting such as shaking hands. Did you know?

01:36 I did not, but I do think that I should not have done that in retrospect. I should have been more precautionary.

01:48 But I wanted to be encouraging to people. So I think it is on that day that I go to Colindale, to PHE.

01:59 And although I have been told that we have a fantastic belt and braces system, I was a little bit concerned about

02:14 I had a feeling that perhaps they were not really as across the situation as I had been led to believe.