French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to close France’s border with Britain on Friday if Prime Minister Boris Johnson failed to take more stringent measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the French newspaper Liberation reported.

“We had to clearly threaten him to make him finally budge,” the newspaper quoted an Elysee official close to Macron as saying, referring to the Johnson administration’s lenient approach to the pandemic.

The report echoed comments made by Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, who also expressed the French government’s displeasure over how Britain was dealing with the crisis.

“If neighbouring countries, Britain for instance, stayed for too long in a situation without taking these measures, then we would find it hard to accept on our soil British nationals who would have been moving freely in their own country,” Philippe said in an interview on Tuesday.