lockdown

"It was lockdown and I was looking for a job in publishing and no-one wanted to hire me," he recalls.

Police advised schools to be placed in lockdown after reports of a suspected gunman on the loose - only to find it was a boy in fancy dress with a toy gun.

As part of measures aimed at controlling the spread of the virus, Britain closed schools for long periods and moved to online learning as part of lockdown in both 2020 and 2021.

Johnson said that, looking back on it all - the intricacy of the rules of six, the complexity of other lockdown and social distancing rules, particularly for children - "I think we probably did go too far".

Later in Tuesday's evidence, Johnson said the lockdown and social distancing rules "probably did go too far", and that children could have been exempted from them.