Children paid a “huge price” to protect others during the Covid pandemic, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson told the inquiry looking at the impact on young people. Johnson 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. n18oc_world n18oc_crux