Boris Johnson is convinced that Covid WAS made in a Chinese lab: In his explosive memoir, former PM rejects theory it started in Wuhan market and says it's likely the virus was a result of a 'botched

Boris Johnson believes that the Covid pandemic started due to a devastating leak from a Chinese laboratory - not as the result of animal-to-human transmission in a Wuhan wildlife market.

In the latest revelation from his sensational new memoir, Mr Johnson abandons his initial assertion when he was Prime Minister that more than seven million people died worldwide because the virus 'jumped species'.

In bombshell remarks which will pile fresh pressure on the Chinese government to come clean about the origins of the virus, Mr Johnson writes in Unleashed: 'The awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made, in all its aspects.

'It now looks overwhelmingly likely that the mutation was the result of some botched experiment in a Chinese lab.

'Some scientists were clearly splicing bits of virus together like the witches in Macbeth – eye of bat and toe of frog – and oops, the frisky little critter jumped out of the test tube and started replicating all over the world.'

Mr Johnson is the most high profile world leader since Donald Trump to publicly reject the notion that the virus was transmitted 'zoonotically' from infected animals.

The former PM had previously linked it to the 'demented' belief in parts of Asia that 'if you grind up the scales of a pangolin you will somehow become more potent' – although he had gradually become more sceptical as information emerged about the experiments being conducted by Wuhan scientists.

In today's extracts from Unleashed, which is being serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, Mr Johnson describes his final poignant conversation with the Queen when he travelled to Balmoral to seal the handover of power to Liz Truss in 2022.

He writes that the monarch remained mentally sharp despite the ravages of her illness – the details of which he had known for more than a year – and gave him two pieces of final advice.

It is one of a number of touching anecdotes about the Queen in Unleashed, including her curiosity about the public's reaction to the stunt during the opening ceremony of the London Olympics when she 'parachuted' from a helicopter.

Mr Johnson also describes his first visit to Balmoral with then-girlfriend Carrie, after the media had suggested that the monarch took a dim view of the idea of staying at her house as an unmarried couple.

And he gives the heaviest hint yet about the Queen's views on Brexit and reveals her fascination with the age-gap marriage of President Macron of France.

Today's serialisation includes the further revelation that, when he was still recovering from Covid in the summer of 2020, Mr Johnson nearly died when he was swept out to sea in a kayak off the coast of Scotland while he was on holiday with his family.

And he even questions the point of the devastating – and ruinously expensive – lockdowns which he imposed during the pandemic.

It follows the disclosure in extracts in today's Daily Mail that Mr Johnson hatched a plan for British Special Forces to 'invade' Holland and seize vaccines during the pandemic.

It also included a compelling account of how close he came to dying from Covid, a passionate defence of his behaviour over the Partygate gatherings and his description of the way in which the UK's new Brexit freedoms allowed the UK to race ahead of the EU to became the first country in the world to approve and roll out an effective jab.

In April 2020, at the start of the first national lockdown, The Mail on Sunday became the first mainstream media outlet in the world to reveal fears that the virus had leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

A member of Cobra, the Government's secret emergency committee, told us that Ministers were studying intelligence about an accident at Wuhan's Institute of Virology, where scientists were carrying out high-risk experiments to manipulate coronaviruses - sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away - to make them more transmissible.

At the time, the silence from the British political and scientific establishment was deafening. Rather than risk accusing Beijing of culpability for one of the most devastating pandemics in history, the official line remained that the virus had been passed on at an animal market in Wuhan, despite DNA analysis of Covid-19 tracing it to bats found only in distant caves.

Sceptics conflated the thesis with the notion that China had deliberately released the virus as the by-product of a weapons programme - something this newspaper had never claimed - and branded it a 'conspiracy theory'.

America's FBI has since backed Mr Trump's views about the origin of the pandemic, saying that it 'most likely' originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.

In Unleashed, Mr Johnson writes that the UK has fought this anthropogenic disease - which means it was caused or produced by humans - 'with an ever-growing panoply of restrictions that were literally medieval in their savagery and their consequences.'

He adds: 'In locking down our societies, we showed that we had barely progressed since early modern England, when Shakespeare and his colleagues were repeatedly compelled by law to shutter the Globe Theatre, and when they had rules on human contact – no more than six to a funeral, for instance – that eerily prefigured some of the arcane stuff we came up with, week after week, in the Cabinet Room.'