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"If you look at the sequence from February onwards, it's clear that Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) is talking about the possibility, the Cabinet is discussing it in March. Certainly I remember the subject coming up repeatedly," he said. It is right to say Sage had referenced the prospect of "mass school closures" in February 2020. But the top civil servant at the Department for Education (DfE) at the time, Jonathan Slater, wrote in his evidence submitted to the inquiry that "DfE's contingency plans were premised on the assumption that schools (and other education settings) would remain open". And Williamson told the inquiry last week that his ability to plan for closures was impeded by Downing Street. It all points to the chaos of the decision-making processes at the heart of government at the time - something explicitly referenced in earlier evidence by the former children's commissioner Anne Longfield. It wasn't clear who had responsibility for planning for children at the time, she said. What is now clear is that there was no love lost between Johnson and Williamson, the people with the highest responsibility for children's welfare at the time of the pandemic. Last week, we saw the expletive-laden rant Williamson texted to his former boss in which he lamented the "abuse" he had received for the government's decision to shut schools the day after reopening them in January 2021. And on Tuesday, Johnson was confronted with his own leaked messages to his advisers, in which he suggested he wanted to fire those in the DfE after the exam results fiasco of August 2020. He now says the DfE did a "heroic" job of trying to cope with the pandemic. This was described as an "insult" by the Liberal Democrats "to the true heroes of the Covid pandemic: the teachers and doctors, nurses and key workers who put their lives on the line to keep crucial public services going".
