Boris Johnson 'homicidal' over Covid exam chaos, messages to inquiry reveal
Boris Johnson said he was in "homicidal mood" when he considered sacking Gavin Williamson during the height of the Covid crisis, messages to the inquiry revealed today.
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The former prime minister also told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry on Tuesday that children paid a 'huge price' during the Covid pandemic as he denied there was a failure to plan for school closures.
In messages shown to the inquiry today, Mr Johnson said to his chief adviser Dominic Cummings back in the summer of 2020, that his holiday to Scotland had been interrupted.
He said he was back at Chequers, his country retreat, “in a thoroughly homicidal mood” after having to deal with the fallout of an algorithm deciding kids' grades - prompting a public outcry.
He said: “We need a plan for the dept of education. We need a perm sec and we need better ministers and quite frankly we need an agenda of reform. We can’t go on like this. I am thinking of going into number ten and firing people.”
Mr Johnson defended himself against the messages, but said the exam system that year had been “a disaster”.
He told the committee, at his second appearance there: “I think if I look back at my handling of my beloved colleagues over the three-and-a-bit years I was in government, I can think of all sorts of changes I might have made.
“But I don’t think there’s any point in speculating about it now, except I think that on the whole, given the difficulties that we faced, I think that the department under Gavin did a pretty heroic job in trying to cope with Covid, and that was my judgment.”
In response to critics who said the government weren't planning enough to shut schools in February and March 2020, said that it was “obvious” there would need to be “consideration of closing schools” and “it looked to me as though the DfE (Department for Education) was preparing for that”.
He also said that "children who are not particularly vulnerable to Covid were paying a huge, huge price to protect the rest of society.
"And it was an awful, awful thing. As I said, I wish it had been otherwise. I wish we could have found another solution."
Last week, former education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson told the inquiry he had not asked DfE officials to prepare an assessment on the impact of school closures in early 2020, as the advice at the time “was not recommending closures” and Number 10 had not commissioned it.
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In his written evidence, Sir Gavin described a “discombobulating 24-hour sea-change” from keeping schools open on March 16 to talking about closing them on March 17, and an announcement to shut them made the following day.
On Tuesday, Mr Johnson insisted work had been done to plan for school closures, saying: “If you look at the sequence from February onwards, it’s clear that Sage (the 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.”
Mr Johnson added he had received a note from the DfE on March 15 asking for a meeting on the subject “in which they go over all kinds of stuff that are going to be necessary to enact school closures”, including safeguarding, exams and teacher training.
He added he would not have expected the DfE to wait for an instruction from Number 10 before planning for closures and he was “surprised that the permanent secretary at the DfE didn’t feel that it was necessary to look at what contingency arrangements we had”.
He said: “I just think that it was obvious that there had to be consideration of closing schools.
“I was very much hoping that we wouldn’t have to close schools. I thought it was a nightmare idea.”
Asked if he accepts that until March 2020 there had not been a cross-government focus on schools, Mr Johnson said: “No, I don’t really accept that.”
He added: “I think there had already been conversations about the possibility of closing schools. And it looked to me as though the DfE was preparing for that.”
The former prime minister also denied there had been a “dereliction of duty” in failing to plan for school closures during the pandemic, but said officials had been “overwhelmed by the speed of events”.
Sir Jon Coles, the former director-general for schools at the DfE, previously told the UK Covid-19 Inquiry it was an “extraordinary dereliction of duty” for the DfE not to plan for school closures earlier in March 2020.
Asked by inquiry counsel Clair Dobbin KC whether he recognised what happened with exams in the summer of 2020 was “really damaging” to children doing their GCSEs and A-levels, Mr Johnson said he regretted that they did not get the model right initially.
“Was Covid a disaster? Yes. Was the loss of education a disaster? Yes. Was the loss of exams a disaster? Yes,” he said.
“Was the disappointment, anger, the additional frustration of a large number of kids a disaster? Yes, it was, but it has to be seen in the context of us trying to deal with a much, much bigger disaster and that was the loss of learning and the loss of the exams themselves.”