Susanna Reid has recalled the notorious moment prime minister Boris Johnson hid in a fridge to dodge questions from reporters.
Reflecting on the incident on Good Morning Britain, Reid joked about it before teasing Johnson over his unwillingness to appear on the show.
She said: “It was just before the general election back in 2019 and Boris Johnson notoriously does not do interviews with Good Morning Britain,” before showing a counter revealing it has been 1637 days since Johnson last appeared on the show.
It's been over two years since that infamous moment when Boris Johnson chose to hide in a fridge rather than appear on GMB.
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 12, 2022
It has now been 1637 days since Boris Johnson has done an interview with GMB.@SwainITV | @susannareid100 | @richardm56 pic.twitter.com/YiF8qnGSAr
She explained that reporter Jonathan Swain had gone to the dairy Johnson was visiting to try and get some time with the PM. As Jonathan explained: “It’s still etched in my memory. I think we need to go back up to check that he’s still not in there!
“We tried to get him onto the programme didn’t we for months and months and months? And the only way we could do it was to try and ‘doorstep’ him.
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“And he gave us assurances, even that morning, saying ‘I’ll be right out, I’ll be right out,’ as he loaded a cart up with milk and then he decided he still didn’t want to come on GMB.”
He added: “After all of that, he decided he’d had enough, he decided to go into a fridge and we didn’t see him.”
In case you don’t remember, in December 2019 Johnson really did retreat into a fridge during a pre-dawn visit to Modern Milkman in Yorkshire to avoid journalists.
Swain told Johnson he was live on air and Johnson replied “I’ll be with you in a second” and walked off, inside a fridge stacked with milk bottles with his aides.
At the time, Conservative sources reportedly said aides were merely taking a moment to prep the PM for a separate, pre-agreed interview, and not hiding in a fridge but it didn’t look great and unsurprisingly triggered a number of memes.
Meanwhile, today Johnson is facing similar criticism for dodging scrutiny over allegations he attended a lockdown rule breaking garden party in May 2020.
