 No one at the top of government has showered themselves in glory during this pandemic. Boris Johnson divvied and delayed over lockdowns. Rishi Sunak pushed to reopen the economy before it was safe and Matt Hancock doled out £22 billion for a test and trace system that doesn't trace. But the government minister with the most shameful record during this pandemic and who doesn't appear to have had a single achievement to his name is Education Secretary Gavin Williamson. So, given all this, it's not a surprise that while most politicians tend to come off badly when they go up against Piers Morgan, we've shown you two screamers this week, in fact, one with Pretty Patel and one with Matt Hancock. Gavin Williamson comes off even worse. You assure us in late December that the schools would definitely be reopening. Everyone got wildly excited and everyone went back to school for one day and then they had to shut, which was one of many, many U-turns that you've had to make in this pandemic. I mean, if you go over your charge sheet, your record as leading our education system, repeatedly shamed over school meals by a footballer, exam result fiasco, the school reopening catastrophe where you basically sent millions of kids back to school for one day to all infect each other and then go back to their homes so they can infect their elderly relatives, which may now be why we have this horrifying daily death number. We had a poll at ITV two weeks ago. We asked England's teachers whether you should resign. 92% of them said you should go. And it does beg the question, given this series of abject failures that you've provided, presided over in the last 10 months, why are you still Education Secretary? Why haven't you done the right thing and resigned? And let somebody more competent take over and do a proper job because you have failed our kids. So, Piers, we are facing more disruption to our education system than we've ever seen, even during the Second World War. We are faced with a new variant of a virus that at the start of December wasn't known about and even in mid-December. We knew about the new variant on the 19th of December because the Prime Minister told us it was 70% more transmissible. And yet you said a week later the schools were going to reopen, even though many experts were saying, don't be ridiculous, that is a crazy thing to do. You then insisted on reopening them for one day and said there was not going to be a U-turn. And literally after one day, you shut them down. It is hard to conjure up a more incompetent decision-making process than that. Well, the best the advice that we're receiving as to whether we could continue to have primary schools open, we'd already delayed the opening of secondary schools in light of the new variants. Well, then when the country moved into a COVID alert level 5 and more of the data was coming through, it was a national decision that was taken in the national interest to close schools. I'm not going to repeat all of those failings because Piers Morgan did a very good job of it. I'm just going to very briefly analyse what Gavin Williams said there because his final answer there was very interesting. Could you notice there was a sentence which he started, but he didn't finish. He said, in response to this argument about why they didn't know, why they didn't sort of realise it was inevitable that schools would have to close on 4th of January until the 4th of January. And he said, well, the advice we were receiving was about primary schools. It didn't finish the sentence. And I think the reason he didn't finish the sentence is because the advice from the 22nd of December was that all schools are going to have to close if you've got any hope in hell of getting the R number below 1. He then sort of said, he talks about this alert level 5. And this is quite interesting actually. So this is, do you remember, it looked a bit like the sort of Nando's spicy gradient. And we can go from red to green alert level 1, 2, 3, 4, blah, blah, blah. And this was initially seen to be a bit of a sort of PR stunt. It seemed like a PR exercise for the government. It turns out actually it was quite useful for Chris Witte and the other chief medical officers to force something on Boris Johnson when he was so, so resistant to it that there was no other way of making it happen. So when it came to schools, what was going on inside government was you had Chris Witte and the chief scientists, the chief scientific advisor sort of saying, look, you've got to change course. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Boris Johnson's got Tsunak in his ear saying, no, we have to keep the economy going. Gavin Williamson's in his ear just saying like, I want to keep schools open because I haven't managed to buy anyone laptops yet. And so he's like, well, we'll keep them open until there's this big intervention from the chief medical officer who's like, we're going into, you know, alert level five. And then he basically took the choice out of Boris Johnson's hand. So that idea, they didn't have the advice beforehand. It's just not true. That was, I suppose, the well researched critique of Williamson's time in office. But next, he really went in for the kill. Have you offered your resignation to the prime minister at any stage of this pandemic? Yes or no? Our focus, my focus, is making sure that children get the best remote education while they're not in school. I know, of course, if you're the education secretary, I expect it to be. But have you offered your resignation? Our focus is making sure that children attend their school to be in a possible moment. And, Piers, the other thing that we're doing, and we're also... Is there a problem on the line? Can you not hear me? And, you know, our focus... Mr. Williamson, you seem to be totally ignoring me. I'm just asking you a straight question. Given the level of failure in your reign as education secretary in this pandemic, given that 92% of teachers in England want you to go, given that you're being described by the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats as the worst education secretary in British history, I simply ask you, have you looked in the mirror and thought, you know what, I've done a terrible job. I'm going to say to the Prime Minister, it's time for me to step aside and let somebody more competent take over. Have you had that conversation with yourself? And have you then had it with the Prime Minister? Piers, my one focus is making sure we deliver very best for children. We know what your focus is. You're the education secretary. The problem is, your focus has not proven to be very good, has it? That, you know, we're dealing with a global pandemic where we've had to make decisions as incredible pace, decisions that none of us would have wanted to take. You've made a series of bad decisions, Education Secretary, decisions that have had huge ramifications for teachers, for students, for parents. You've been a catastrophe. Own it. So our focus is always about bringing children back into the classroom. Now, the subject matter is not funny. The subject matter is tragic. What Gavin Williamson has done over the past nine months is put teachers at risk and basically gaslit them. They've said teachers are at no more risk than the rest of the population. Not true. He's forced kids to go into school one day so that they can all, you know, share coronavirus around them, only to have a lockdown by that afternoon. The thing that strikes me more about Gavin Williamson that I think is so sort of unique about his role as a Secretary of State is not the mistakes he's made, but that he hasn't done anything positive. So there's also from the Times report, I'm about to run up to this final lockdown where apparently in one of those COVID sessions that the people at the top of government have someone said about closing schools, ah, but they don't have laptops yet for the kids about them. And Matt Hancock was like, what's Gavin Williamson been doing for the last nine months? Because Matt Hancock's made a lot of mistakes, but also the Department of Health has at least done some stuff. Unfortunately, we never get Secretaries of State on this show because I would absolutely love to grill them, but we do give the best analysis of the bullshit they talk about. So make sure you subscribe to the Navar immediate channel. You can watch this show live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm. And if you subscribe, you can see all the videos we put out as well. Dahlia, I want to bring you in on this. And in fact, there's a super chat from Dan TFT of a fiver, Michael and Dahlia, can you name a worst candidate for education secretary? It's surprisingly difficult. I mean, I just that interview was absolutely like one of the most tragic things I've ever seen in my life. I think it was the idea of Piers Morgan like calling on Gavin Williamson's like, look at himself in the mirror and be like, I'm a piece of shit. Like it just was so like, oh my God, how are we here? But this is a government that just fails upwards. They figured out that this kind of moment with Piers Morgan is a bit of an exception to that, but they figured out that in general, the media treats them with such kid gloves and has such little will to hold them accountable. So many of these editors and journalists are their mates, that if you just kind of hold your nerve through each failure, it won't be long until the media just kind of back off and it becomes old news. Sometimes even worse than that, which is, you know, I just was thinking about when Rishi Sunak was creating a policy that literally caused another wave of coronavirus and he got portrayed as a literal superhero by the BBC, compare that treatment by the media to the treatment of the institutions that are actually keeping not only workers, but the broader community safe. And those are unions like the NEU, like the FBU, like the fiber gaze union, who are actually putting in the fight necessary to protect. Can you imagine if kids had been in school right now? Like, can you imagine what the infection rates would be right now? And yet for those institutions that are actually doing the work to keep us protected, they are relentlessly demonized, sidelined and sometimes outright lied about as, you know, Matt Rack outlined just earlier in the show. You know, but the absolute kind of failure that Gavin Williamson right now is not just going to be understood in the context of this pandemic. The effects are going to be incredibly long term because of how long children have been kept out of school for and how unprepared the system is to do some kind of distance or hybrid learning. You know, firstly, like the broad failure of the government to keep infections down and to use the time that we've had wisely has basically meant that we've had no option other than to keep schools completely closed for longer periods of time than would have otherwise been necessary. You know, and that's going to have like long term effects on a lot of these kids, particularly from working class backgrounds. But secondly, there's just been a complete lack of leadership when it comes to devising innovative and creative ways to deal with this new normal to prepare for, you know, equitable distance learning, whether that means, you know, using the time that we had, for example, when this in the summer, when transmit when infection rates were low, using that time to experiment with different kinds of models of education that could work in distance learning, making sure that every kid had the means to do distance learning in an adequate way. Because, you know, as someone who's who's done teaching in a hybrid setting, the main issue is that a lot of, you know, it's very, very difficult to keep kids and get to keep students engaged. But there are ways through, you know, because of uneven technological access, some students having like really bad internet connection, students not having like the space and the ability to kind of do what they need to do. So all you could have had, you know, a system whereby in the summer when infection rates were really low, having, you know, maybe more of the teaching term that would have, that's being conducted now, done back then, there was just no, and I'm not saying that any of that could necessarily work. I haven't, you know, you need to kind of look into that. But there's just been such little innovation, such little creativity when it comes to dealing with a situation that we always, we knew was a long time coming. We knew the winter was going to be hard. We knew for a long time as well that schools were super spreader sites. But instead, Gavin Williamson focuses on wasting that really precious time of doggedly like pursuing a failed strategy until the very last minute, instead of using that precious time to pursue something else or to innovate and create different ways of doing things around these conditions that are going to be with us for a while. And then not giving, and then changing at the last minute, therefore not giving teachers enough time to prepare. So now we have the worst of both worlds, which is that students are doing remote learning, but they're doing it in ways that teachers and schools have not been able to prepare for to make it a viable way of teaching. And this really does come down to a kind of total disrespect and lack of engagement with teachers and workers more generally that we have seen from this government, who, and those workers and teachers are the best placed to actually devise something that is feasible and to actually declare like what is and is not possible and what is and is not in the best interests of children's learning. And we saw that in the abhorrent treatment of the education unions by the government and the media and had more time actually been spent collaborating with the unions, collaborating with teachers to think, okay, how are we going to make the best of a bad situation in order to minimize the outcomes of this disrupted learning for children, then maybe we would have actually been in a much better situation here. But that, and that is the scandal. And I guess the thing is, you know, why should Williamson resign when this kind of approach of doggedly pursuing bad strategies until the last minute and not giving people enough time to prepare for the thing that we knew was going to be inevitable? That's kind of the substance of the government's approach across the board.