How the top female civil servant abused by Dominic Cummings took quiet and deadly revenge

Helen MacNamara, Whitehall’s most senior woman, told the Covid inquiry how Boris Johnson sanctioned behaviour that was ‘miles away from what is right or proper or decent, or what the country deserves’, writes John Rentoul

Helen MacNamara recalls being described as a ‘c***’ by Dominic Cummings (UK Covid-19 Inquiry/AFP via Getty)

Dominic Cummings apologised for his “terrible” language at the Covid inquiry yesterday, but didn’t seem to mean it. Helen MacNamara, on the other hand, delivered her evidence with the impeccable manners you would expect from a former top civil servant.

But if anything, her measured criticism of the way that Boris Johnson handled the pandemic was even more explosive than Cummings’s freewheeling attack on his former boss.

MacNamara responded to the appalling sexist rant by Cummings, revealed at the inquiry yesterday, with an understated calm that was so much more damning for its restraint and decorum. And she politely but sharply made it clear not just who was responsible for the “toxic”, “macho” culture in No 10 during the coronavirus crisis, but who was responsible for tolerating such demeaning behaviour.

MacNamara, who was deputy cabinet secretary during the pandemic, began her evidence unpromisingly by saying that her phone had been wiped. Not another one! She had returned her phone to the Cabinet Office when she left government in 2021; since then, the Cabinet Office, which she used to run, had told her that the material on it had been destroyed, which she described as “frustrating”.

But it slowly became clear that she did not need her phone to remember in some detail what had happened, and what she had thought about it.

She started her evidence proper with a light bombardment of enemy positions, to soften Cummings up for the assault to come. Morale among civil servants was low at the time the coronavirus struck, she said, because “hostile briefing against the civil service” had destroyed trust.

She did not need to add that Cummings was well known for his low opinion of most of Whitehall – even if he didn’t actually say that a “hard rain is coming” for an “incoherent” Cabinet Office until after the first wave of the virus.

In early 2020, she said, Johnson’s political team had a “monomaniacal focus on Brexit”, thinking that “everything else could wait until after this question was settled”. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020.

And when Johnson did think about coronavirus, his attitude at the start was that “the UK would sail through” and it was “unlikely to have a big impact”, she said, adding: “I felt personally that it was deeply worrying.”

She was critical of the “confident”, “macho” and “bravado” style Johnson and his team adopted: “Everything’s smashing; going brilliantly.” She said she felt “patronised” when she questioned the tone.

Whitehall and Westminster had always been “endemically sexist”, she said, but it had changed when she came back to work in April 2020 after a bout of Covid. The sidelining and talking-over of women was “striking and awful”. It was partly explained by the pressures of the crisis, and the ego-driven experts brought in to deal with it. “If you have 15 people who all think they are there to save the day”, she said, it does not make for effective teamwork.

But she was very clear who was ultimately responsible for the toxic, sexist culture at the heart of government. “If I go back to when I was working for Mrs May”, there was no way that such attitudes would have developed, she said.

The inquiry heard from a draft report MacNamara compiled soon after she came back to the office. “Bad behaviours from senior leaders [are] tolerated,” it said. “We need a modern culture of organised collaboration not [a] superhero bunfight.”

In case it wasn’t clear whose bad behaviour was tolerated and who did the tolerating, she was asked about that email – the one published by the inquiry on Tuesday, in which Cummings, the prime minister’s senior adviser, wrote to Lee Cain, in effect his deputy, saying he would “personally handcuff her and escort her from the building”, and that “we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that c***”.

MacNamara was calmly devastating in her response. “It was horrible to read,” she said. “It was both surprising and not surprising to me; I don’t know which is worse.” She said she felt it was revealing of “exactly the wrong attitude” towards both women and the civil service.

And she was clear that Cummings should not have been given licence to behave in this way by Johnson: “It was disappointing to me that the prime minister didn’t pick him up on that violent and misogynistic language.” Johnson will no doubt protest, when he gives evidence to the inquiry, probably in December, that he didn’t see that particular email. But it is clear from so much of the evidence already seen by the inquiry that it was not an isolated instance of crude and sexist language.

In case the inquiry failed to understand the volcanic meaning of “disappointing” in mandarinese, MacNamara spelt out in a level tone, slowly enough for the stenographers to transcribe, what she thought of Cummings and Johnson’s behaviour. It was “miles away from what is right or proper or decent, or what the country deserves”.

To be fair, Johnson did eventually reprimand Cummings, as the inquiry saw on Tuesday, saying of his behaviour – and in particular his habit of blaming things on Johnson’s wife, Carrie: “This is a totally disgusting orgy of narcissism by a government that should be solving a national crisis.” Unfortunately, it was too late, two days after Cummings walked out of No 10 carrying a cardboard box in November 2020.

In the “superhero bunfight” between Cummings and MacNamara, the drama was enhanced because neither protagonist is pure. Cummings is not a simple stage villain. His energy, along with his unconventional, analytical mind, was sometimes useful to the prime minister, who had, after all, been democratically elected.

Cummings and MacNamara had some things in common. “Mr Cummings and I are both history graduates,” she told the inquiry. “We were collectively underconfident in asking questions about science.”

They agreed on the broad approach to the pandemic. On that unlucky Friday 13th of March, they had both come to the same conclusion at the same time: that the government had to mobilise everything to deal with the virus. MacNamara’s language on that occasion was as coarse as Cummings’s; she told him: “We are absolutely f***ed.”

And she was guilty of a “misjudgement” in taking part in illegal gatherings during lockdown. Andrew O’Connor, the inquiry counsel, didn’t even ask her about the karaoke machine she brought to someone’s leaving drinks during lockdown – an act for which she received a police fine.

But in the end, she got the better of her clash with Cummings this week. He apologised for his “terrible” language, but said it wasn’t sexist because he was ruder to men; she apologised for taking part in lockdown parties, and seemed sincere. He was like an iconoclast, tearing everything down and being rude to everyone in the name of a higher good that was never specified. She defended the principles of an impartial civil service, of equality for women, and of decency in public life.

Cummings 0, MacNamara 1.