At least Gavin Williamson tried to keep schools open during Covid

Governing means accepting and embracing trade-offs. Almost every public policy choice involves deciding how important one set of people are, or how to balance their interests with others.

Covid mitigation measures were a case study in government-as-trade-off. Time and again, ministers had to weigh up public health, NHS capacity, economic and fiscal costs, human freedom and countless other factors. Covid choices were especially stark because they very visibly involved the sickness and death of some of those people.

None of those choices were easy or simple and you shouldn’t take seriously anyone who says they were. You should also remember that many of those choices were made by people short on time and information, at the top of bureaucratic organisations that rarely had a real grip on events.

This is the context of the Telegraph’s lockdown files reporting. The latest revelations from those files illustrate the point about trade-offs and interests painfully well.