Boris Johnson's Partygate defence offensive - bereaved mum

A woman who was forced to obey lockdown rules while her teenage son with leukaemia was dying says she found Boris Johnson's justifications for number 10 lockdown breaches offensive.

The former prime minister repeatedly told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday he did not intentionally mislead Parliament over Partygate.

Louise Bennett said she had watched "to hear what his defence was going to be".

She thought he had appeared "slightly bewildered" at being questioned.

Her son Fred was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia in 2019. When the pandemic began in early 2020, he was an inpatient at Birmingham Children's Hospital and later at Great Ormond Street.

Mrs Bennett, of Dunchurch, in Warwickshire, told BBC Radio 5 live: "We really saw close up how lockdown unfolded and what was required of everybody."

The rules imposed by the UK government restricted the number of people who could visit her son, then aged 14.

She said her younger son had been unable to see Fred at all in his final six weeks and she and her husband had had to visit him separately, until "eventually my husband was allowed in for the last week or so".

During the pandemic, she said she and her husband had had to make "really difficult decisions" because of restrictions on meeting people.

She previously said she found the actions of the people in Downing Street involved in the Partygate scandal "really offensive".

Mrs Bennett said on Thursday as time had gone by, she had also found Boris Johnson's justification for his actions "offensive".

Mr Johnson told the Parliamentary Privileges Committee the guidelines - as he understood them - were followed at all times and he had been right to try to lift the morale of his staff.

He told the committee: "I will believe to the day I die that it was my job to thank staff for what they had done, especially during a crisis like Covid which kept coming back, which seemed to have no end, and when people's morale, I'm afraid, did begin to sink."

Mrs Bennett said: "I wonder what he thought the rest of us were doing and what our morale was like?"

She described the strict restrictions placed on hospital staff and said their morale had been "on the floor".

Mrs Bennett said: "I cannot believe that the leader of a country can say: 'I read these rules out on television every day or every week, but I didn't really understand what they were and needed other people to tell me whether this was OK'.

"I just don't think he thought that the guidelines were applicable to him or the people around him," she said.

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