Covid Inquiry: Boris Johnson Says Lockdown And Social Distancing Went too far

By Ben Kerrigan-

Former prime minister, Boris Johnson, has said the lockdown and social distancing rules “probably did go too far”, and that children could have been exempted from them.

While “hopefully this thing never happens again”, he said in any future pandemic, the closure of schools “really should be a measure of last resort”.

Speaking to an inquiry looking at  the impact of the lockdown on young people, Johnson said  children paid a “huge price” to protect others during the Covid pandemic.  Johnson was speaking to an the inquiry looking at the impact on young people.

Expressing pride in  what teachers and schools did to cope with the “unbelievably difficult” circumstances, he said  that there had been no plans in place for closing schools in early 2020, adding that  he had assumed a “great deal of thought and care” was already going into those decisions by then.

He also said he had also hoped schools could remain open, calling it a “nightmare idea” and “personal horror” to close them. This year’s cohort of GCSE pupils were final year primary school pupils at the time

Johnson told the inquiry on Tuesday that he accepted the criticism around the lack of planning, but added that making changes to schools would have required a “much greater state of knowledge about Covid and what was likely to happen”.

“The speed at which the disease was progressing” made it harder to plan around, he added, saying the key focus was on trying to avoid an “appalling public health crisis”.

The inquiry has also heard previously about several disagreements between Williamson and Johnson, including over the decision to close schools again in 2021.

Johnson told the inquiry he had wanted to see “mass testing” in schools as a way of keeping them open, before adding that it was “never going to be a runner” because of the new alpha variant which arrived at the same time and accelerated the spread of the disease, he said.

The exam results fiasco of August 2020 were one of the sticky points of Johnson’s premiership.

The Department for Education (DfE) had been forced to go back on its use of an algorithm to award results, which was designed to prevent inflated grades but which instead saw 40% of predicted results downgraded. Pupils were eventually awarded the grades they had been predicted by their teachers, after GCSE and A-level exams were scrapped earlier in the year.

Johnson was also presented with his own leaked messages at the inquiry on Tuesday,in which he had told advisers Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain at the time that the DfE needed “better ministers”.

“We can’t go on like this. I am thinking of going into Number 10 and firing people,” he had said.

Johnson said he had been in a “thoroughly homicidal mood” at the time.

Referencing the exams fiasco, counsel to the inquiry Clair Dobbin KC suggested to Johnson that “the whole thing was a disaster”.

“If you mean was Covid a disaster? Yes. Was the loss of education a disaster? Yes. Was the loss of exams a disaster? Yes. Was the disappointment, anger, frustration of a large number of kids – the additional frustration – a disaster? Yes it was,” Johnson said.

“But it has to be seen in the context of us trying to deal with a much, much bigger disaster,” he added, referencing the loss of learning and exams.

“On the whole”, he said the DfE had done a pretty “heroic job” of trying to cope with the pandemic.