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Piers Morgan has torn into Boris Johnson over his “disingenuous” address to the nation on Sunday night.
The Good Morning Britain presenter said the prime minister’s televised speech outlining changes to the lockdown was a “total waste of time”, claiming many of the rules “made no sense”.
After Johnson claimed the government’s coronavirus strategy to this point had saved thousands of lives, Piers tweeted: “So disingenuous. The Prime Minister changed UK strategy after he was told the herd immunity policy he’d been pursuing for weeks would lead to 500k deaths.
“How many died unnecessarily before he U-turned to the way everyone else was already doing it?”
Piers claimed the PM’s announcement that members of the same household would be allowed to sit in parks or play sport together outside was nonsensical, noting: “I haven’t seen two of my sons for 10 weeks. They live 10 minutes away, next to a large common. Am I allowed to go and see them, if I stay 2 metres away?
“The answer appears to be no, yet I can see 1000s of strangers a day in my local park if I stay 2m away. Makes no sense.
“I can drive 100s of miles to sunbathe alongside complete strangers on a beach, maintaining 2m distance - but not see my parents? This is ridiculous.”
As Piers returned to work on Good Morning Britain on Monday following a week off due to illness, he told co-host Susanna Reid he was feeling “extremely frustrated by what I watched last night”.
He said: “I don’t know where it leaves us and I don’t understand the sequence of events here.
“Boris Johnson clears 15 minutes of prime time, Sunday night television to address the nation, and you expect when you get that amount of time on a Sunday night at seven o’clock you would get loads of great detail that clears everything up.
“Instead we got a load of his usual flim-flam, his bluster, his bellicose, fist-pumping rhetoric. But when it gets to the detail, I don’t know where it leaves us.”
On Monday morning, foreign secretary Dominic Raab has appeared on rival breakfast show BBC Breakfast in an attempt to clarify some of the new rules, including meeting more than one loved-one in outdoor spaces.
“If you’re out in the park and you’re two metres apart, we’re saying now, and use some common sense and you socially distance, you can meet up with other people,” he said.
However, the government has since clarified this was not correct for Raab to say, insisting people will only be allowed to meet one other person in a park – and they must obey social distancing guidelines.
Raab was previously lambasted by Piers on Twitter for apparently declining to appear on GMB to respond to the public’s questions about the prime minister’s address.
The presenter called it “a shameful dereliction of his duty to the public who pay his wages”.
It comes after Piers claimed the government had imposed a “pathetic and cowardly” ban on ministers appearing on the ITV breakfast show, following controversial interviews with care minister Helen Whately and health secretary Matt Hancock last month.
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays from 6am on ITV.