LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to avoid a second lockdown last autumn, arguing that most of those dying were over 80, according to his former aide-turned bitter foe Dominic Cummings.

In a BBC interview airing on Tuesday, the mastermind of Johnson’s anti-EU Brexit campaign said his former boss “put his own political interests ahead of people’s lives”.

Cummings resigned as chief Downing Street advisor in November after an internal power struggle. In the latest of a series of attacks on the government, he shared WhatsApp messages apparently from Johnson.

In one message shown by Cummings to the BBC, the prime minister allegedly wrote in October that most people were dying from the virus at a ripe old age.

“The median age is 82-81 for men 85 for women. That is above life expectancy. So get Covid and Live longer,” Johnson was said to have written in the text message.

The prime minister also apparently downplayed the pandemic’s impact on the National Health Service (NHS), despite himself receiving intensive care treatment for Covid last spring.

“I no longer buy all this nhs overwhelmed stuff. Folks I think we may need to recalibrate,” the WhatsApp message from October 15 says, two weeks before Johnson did in fact announce a second lockdown.

Cummings summarised Johnson’s attitude at the time as: “This is terrible but the people dying are essentially all over 80 and we can’t kill the economy just because of people dying over 80.”

Asked if Cummings’ recollection was correct, Johnson’s spokesman flatly responded “no”, and insisted that he had been “guided by the best scientific advice” throughout the pandemic.