Former prime minister’s claims about wanting to seize Covid vaccines being held in the EU ‘may have been a joke’

Senior Tories have cast doubt on Boris Johnson’s claim that he seriously considered invading the Netherlands to seize vaccines during the pandemic, saying the story had obviously been overblown and re-heated to boost sales of his memoirs.

The former prime minister says in his new book, Unleashed, that he asked senior members of the armed forces about the possibility of conducting an “aquatic raid” on a warehouse in Leiden in March 2021 in order to get hold of 5m doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine which he believed the EU did not want to be exported to the UK.