Covid-19 kills newsagent called 'Baseball Bhatt' by Boris Johnson

A newsagent who was once called 'Baseball Bhatt' by the UK prime minister Boris Johnson has died of Covid-19.

Harendra Bhatt, 61, died in hospital after succumbing to the virus. He was a local hero as he defended his shop with a baseball bat when a violent drunk attacked his news kiosk, reported The Daily Mail.

Comedian and broadcaster Clive Anderson and Radio 4 Today presenter Nick Robinson had paid tribute to him last week.

His father Lalit, 84, who’d set up their newspaper kiosk outside a North London station in the 1980s, died of Covid a few days earlier, the report added.

Boris Johnson was Bhatt's regular customer when he lived in the area near Highbury and Islington station.

"I am so sorry to hear about Harendra – a cheery independent newsagent who rightly defended his shop against thugs many years ago. My thoughts are with all his family and friends," Johnson told The Mail on Sunday.

"He was incredibly forthright and had a huge amount of knowledge of what was going on in the world. He was always very interested in what was going on in people’s lives, too, and had an uncanny ability to know what paper or magazine I was coming in to buy," said Anderson.

The BBC’s Robinson said: "He greatly admired Boris Johnson and he absolutely loved it that Boris called him Mr Baseball Bhatt. He was a super guy and it is a really sad loss that he is gone."

According to reports, Bhatt once staged a one-man protest when the Islington council once tried to remove him from his pitch.

Bhatt set up the shop with his father in the mid-1980s, having lived in Yemen and India.

"He was exemplary proof of how small shops and newsagents are cornerstones of local communities," fellow shopkeeper Dipak Amin  told The Daily Mail.