THE POLICE did an “excellent job” by pre-arresting protesters before the King’s coronation, a Government minister has said.

Minister for Primary Care and Public Health, Neil O’Brien, told GB News: “Well, I think the police did a really excellent job over the Coronation, enabling a fantastic joyous national event to take place without incident, and stopping people who wanted to do silly and irresponsible things like setting off rape alarms from disrupting events.

“So I think that they did a good job this weekend. It’s obviously regrettable if anybody gets themselves arrested on what should be a really good occasion for the nation.

“But I think the police did a good job overall and overall enabled a really great and impressive event that the entire nation enjoyed.”

In an interview during Breakfast with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster, he continued: “The threat was that people were going to deliberately let off rape alarms in order to scare horses and disrupt that procession.

“That would have been a tremendously dangerous thing to do. If you start with a lot of horses, people could have been trampled. And as well as being disruptive, it could have been a really dangerous, stupid thing to do.

“So I think that the police did the right thing in keeping order in enforcing, generally decent behaviour. So I think that they’ve done the right thing and that in a difficult scenario, they always have to make tough decisions.

The Minister also spoke about the Government’s new primary healthcare plan which aims to place more importance on pharmacies in future.

Asked if the investment is a drop in the ocean, as the number of pharmacies is down to 2015 levels, he said: “There are more pharmacies than there were when we came to office.

“This investment that we’re making today, of another £645 million is exactly a response to those pressures. And it’s responding to something that a lot of pharmacists have said to me, which is that they want to do more, they want to do more proper clinical work and advanced services.

“And by making this big investment today, we’re going to enable just that and so that will take some of the pressure off pharmacies, as well as taking pressure off GPs.”