My takeaway from the testimony of Dominic Cummings? We needed more women in the room

What emerged from hours of questions was that at the very heart of government during the pandemic, there was just a bunch of blokes trying to out-swing each other, writes Katy Brand

Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former chief adviser, on his way to give evidence to MPs (PA)

Where were you when Dominic Cummings was giving his evidence to MPs on Wednesday morning? I was in my living room, trying to work on something else, and failing. One friend shared on social media that he was driving through the vast magnificence of the Outer Hebrides with it playing on the radio. Another texted she was up at 4am in New York to tune in. Where was Angela Merkel, I wonder? Or Jacinda Arden? Or Iceland’s Katrin Jakobsdottir? Or Finland’s Sanna Marin? Were they watching too?

Where indeed were any women at all? Because they were strangely absent from Dominic Cummings’s account of the maximum chaos raging around 10 Downing Street once the true scale of the Covid-19 pandemic emerged back in early 2020. The pandemic was real. And it was about to get realer.

In fact, the only really senior woman mentioned in the whole six hours was the only person who seemed to have grasped the severity of the situation. Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser described how everyone got a wake-up call when the then deputy cabinet secretary, Helen MacNamara, said to him the immortal words: “There is no plan. I think we’re absolutely f***ed. I think we’re going to kill thousands of people.”