A "death of Stalin”-type scenario was being planned for while Boris Johnson was hospitalised with coronavirus, according to the Prime Minister.
In an interview with the Sun on Sunday, Johnson said that arrangements were made to announce his death after he was put into intensive care last month.
The Tory leader spent three nights in an ICU at St Thomas' in London with the disease, where he said medics gave him "litres and litres of oxygen".
Johnson described it as a "tough old moment", adding: "They had a strategy to deal with a 'death of Stalin'-type scenario.
"I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place.
"The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong.”
Joseph Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, prompted a brutal power struggle which resulted in the execution of security chief Lavrenti Beria, as well as five of his associates, and the installation of Nikita Khruschev as leader of the Soviet Union.
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Johnson, 55, said it was "hard to believe" his health had deteriorated in just a few days, saying he "couldn't understand why I wasn't getting better".
The PM told the paper the "indicators kept going in the wrong direction" and that he kept asking himself: "How am I going to get out of this?"
"The bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe.
"That was when it got a bit ... they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally."
The UK’s official coronavirus death toll has now reached 28,710, though estimates including care home deaths and people who had not been tested are far higher.
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