Medics including from the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and senior NHS figures in the North East have hit out at a Tory MP's "insult" after he defended Boris Johnson 's Downing Street parties by suggesting that "teachers and nurses [...] would tend to go back to the staff room and have a quiet drink" during the pandemic.
Michael Fabricant, the Conservative MP for Lichfield, was being interviewed on Sky News when he said he thought the Prime Minister Boris Johnson would be forced to apologise to the House of Commons after he was fined for attending a party in Downing Street during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Mr Fabricant said: "Having said that, I don’t think that at any time [Johnson] thought that he was breaking the law.
"I think that at the time he thought, just like many teachers and nurses who after a very, very long shift would tend to go back to the staff room and have a quiet drink - which is more or less what he has done. But I don’t think he thought he was breaking the law. But of course that doesn’t make any sort of excuse."
