Businessman Blair wanted UAE taken off red travel list

TONY Blair personally lobbied Matt Hancock to have the UAE removed from the travel red list because ‘he does a lot of business over there’, the former health secretary claims.

Mr Hancock also allowed the former prime minister to dodge quarantine on his return from a signing ceremony at the White House in Washington.

The Pandemic Diaries reveal Mr Blair regularly contacted the Cabinet minister in 2020 to ask for favours or discuss policy. In one exchange in July 2020, Mr Blair protested that the United Arab Emirates was still on the quarantine red list, claiming they had a lot of cases only ‘because they do so much testing’.

Mr Hancock said he had to ‘resist the urge to ping back an eye-roll emoji at that old chestnut’.

Mr Blair’s spokesman said his not-for-profit organisation, The Tony Blair Institute, ‘had been calling for greater transparency on the criteria by which countries’ risks were assessed’, adding: ‘It was not about one country but the need for... clear and consistent data across each country.’