Rachel Johnson has hit out at the Government’s decision to impose “strict” lockdown restrictions, as police relentlessly pursued her father and her mother suffered in what she described as a “care home prison”. The LBC host revealed how “tricky” it was for her family and herself to navigate Covid rules amid intense police and media scrutiny. Boris Johnson’s anti-lockdown sister allegedly split her time between her Notting Hill property in London and the family farm in Dulverton, Exmoor. Her journeys got her into trouble on multiple occasions with the press and police chasing the 57-year-old.
In a comment piece for The Telegraph, she described how a neighbour “ratted on” her father to the police while she and her father were trying their best to socially distance and queue outside the local greengrocer.
She added having her own brother as the head of the country and the instigator of those rules only made things worse.
She wrote: “The snitch had rung the authorities to report that a member of the family was on the hill farm and therefore it stood to reason, guv, that one of the lesser-spotted Johnsons had broken the travel restrictions.”
At the time, she feared this could have been a “good gotcha” moment as her own brother, Boris Johnson, had imposed Covid rules.
Ms Johnson, who repeatedly voiced her scepticism of lockdown rules on her LBC show, took issue with her brother’s Covid policy, saying she “opposed lockdown on a cellular level” – and still does.
She explained: “I have to accept that ultimately schools were closed, the entire population pretty much incarcerated in their own homes, with our sick, vulnerable, frail and elderly people rotting in solitary for months and months on end, and it was all signed off by him.”
The media scrutiny continued, she says, with the MailOnline front cover featuring her nodding off maskless on a train to Taunton from her evening radio show. The Mirror showed her on “page six of shame” for walking down the street in tennis gear.
She added: “The plight of those in care homes fills me with the most unquenchable rage, even to this day.”
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Ms Johnson, whose “lonely” widowed mother lived in one with a carer, admitted to breaking Covid rules by taking her Christmas dinner in 2020.
Her comments come as the Government’s Covid policy has come under renewed scrutiny with 100,000 leaked WhatsApp messages between then-health secretary Hancock and other ministers at the height of the pandemic in what is becoming the biggest leak of data involving the Government since the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal.
Among the revelations leaked is Matt Hancock rejecting the Chief Medical Officer’s advice to test for Covid all residents going into English care homes.
Ms Johnson “cheered” the leaked WhatsApp messages, now dubbed The Lockdown Files, and praised freelance journalist Isabel Oakeshott for “doing such a majestic public service”.
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