When John Wilson’s wife Pauline died suddenly of COVID-19, he had not seen her for a fortnight.
Key points:
- Dominic Cummings, special adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, drove his family 420km to visit his parents during the lockdown
- Despite calls for Mr Cummings to be sacked, Mr Johnson has stood by him
- John Wilson was unable to visit his wife Pauline as she died of COVID-19 in hospital
Ms Wilson, 70, had taken a turn for the worse on the morning of March 29 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the British town of Aylesbury.
“I was up early, about 5 o’clock, and I rang [the hospital] and she was OK, and about an hour later I got a call back from one of the doctors to say she had suddenly had a collapse, oxygen levels were very, very low and they had no way of getting them up,” Mr Wilson told 7.30.
“In the late afternoon, I got a call saying that she had actually died.”
With the UK’s strict lockdown restrictions in place, Mr Wilson was forbidden from entering the hospital and holding Ms Wilson’s hand during her final moments.
Later, he was not permitted to see his wife’s body or collect her belongings.
“We all stuck by the rules. It’s not just me, everybody I know has stuck by the rules.”
Cummings controversy
But while Ms Wilson lay dying alone, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man, was flouting the lockdown restrictions and in the process deeply dama