Piers Morgan has blasted the prime minister once again, calling Boris Johnson’s delay in the decision to close English schools “utterly insane”.
Following increasing pressure, the PM announced on Monday night that all schools would close as part of a new national lockdown in England.
It came after Johnson’s calls on Sunday for parents to send their children to school if they were open amid some localised closures, insisting they were “safe”.
Following the PM’s U-turn on Monday night, Piers vented his frustration the situation, stating it was “so indicative of the way the government has handled” the pandemic.
Speaking on Tuesday’s Good Morning Britain, he said: “All the kids, we know, are the biggest passers on of the virus, he sends them all back to school to mingle together for one day so they can all share the virus, and sends them all back home so they can infect all their elderly relatives. What a brilliant idea from the prime minister.
“How did they go from being completely safe on Sunday and yesterday morning to being so dangerous they all have to be closed? We know the answer, the answer is he eventually got to the right decision.
“The case numbers of this variant of Covid-19 are exploding. We could see that, we could see that before Sunday. We could all see the numbers. Why, why do you do this? Why do you send all the kids? Why do you disrupt everybody’s lives completely unnecessarily, parents, kids, everything, for one day and then pull the plug?
“It is utterly insane and so indicative of the way the government has handled this campaign.”
In his national TV address on Monday, Johnson admitted that parents “may reasonably ask why” decisions on schools were not taken sooner.
He said: “The answer is simply that we’ve been doing everything in our power to keep schools open because we know how important each day in education is to children’s life chances.”
Johnson added: “I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe for children. Children are still very unlikely to be severely affected by even the new variant of Covid.
“The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
It followed the decisions of first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon and her Welsh counterpart Mark Drakeford to close schools in the devolved nations. Northern Ireland is expected to follow suit, Arlene Foster said.
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.