Priti Patel seemed to lose sight of her ministerial position today after she told Tory supporters that she wanted to close the UK border to international visitors in March when the pandemic first hit.
The comments, said to have been made to the Conservative Friends of India group, are contrary to her public defence of the Government’s decision not to enact a full arrivals shutdown.
In comments first reported by political website Guido Fawkes, Ms Patel, the Home Secretary, said: “On ‘should we have closed our borders earlier’, the answer is yes. I was an advocate of closing them last March.”
In mid-March, the UK abandoned asking people to quarantine for two weeks after arriving from areas with high infection rates, such as Hubei province in China and Italy.
The decision was in contrast to many other countries, such as New Zealand, which has been widely praised for getting the pandemic under control, partly through strict quarantine measures for arrivals.
The UK Government introduced blanket quarantine restrictions in June for all international travellers, except those coming from Ireland, while “travel corridors” with countries deemed to have safe levels of infection were established a month later.
Ministers this week suspended all travel corridors and introduced new rules requiring arrivals to produce a negative coronavirus test taken up to 72 hours before departure and to self-isolate for up to 10 days after entering the UK, in a move designed to prevent new strains of Covid-19 entering the UK.
On Wednesday, Ms Patel told broadcasters that the Government had followed scientific advice over border controls.
She told BBC Breakfast: “Government has listened to a range of advice and followed advice from professionals and advisers – medical and scientific – from day one of this pandemic and there has been collective decision making across the board.
“When it comes to border measures, for example, there was a lot of work that took place last year, both in transport and in the Home Office, but also working with the scientists who advised us at the time when coronavirus was incredibly high that it would not have made a difference to have taken border measures.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We have strong measures at the border in place which are vital as we roll out the vaccine.”
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