Children paid 'huge price' in Covid pandemic, Johnson tells inquiry

Children paid a "huge price" to protect others during the Covid pandemic, Boris Johnson has told the inquiry looking at the impact on young people.

The former prime minister repeated an apology made previously for things the government got wrong, but said he was proud of what teachers and schools did to cope with the "unbelievably difficult" circumstances.

He pushed back on earlier suggestions that there had been no plans in place for closing schools in early 2020, saying he had assumed a "great deal of thought and care" was already going into those decisions by then.

But he said he had also hoped schools could remain open, calling it a "nightmare idea" and "personal horror" to close them.

Former education secretary Gavin Williamson gave his own evidence to the inquiry last week, in which he said the government had made an error in "sticking to the plan" of trying to keep schools open in March 2020.

The inquiry was told a plan was only made on 17 March 2020 - the day before an announcement that schools were closing.

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".