A former senior Downing Street civil servant has criticised Boris Johnson for failing to act against his former top adviser Dominic Cummings when he used what she described as “violent and misogynistic language” against her.
Helen MacNamara was giving evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry a day after an appearance by Cummings, when he was asked about messages showing he tried to sack her, saying No 10 was “dodging stilettos from that cunt”.
MacNamara, who served as deputy cabinet secretary, told the inquiry: “The way in which it was considered appropriate to describe what should happen to me, yes, as a woman, but, yes, as a civil servant, it is disappointing to me that the prime minister didn’t pick him up on the use of some of that violent and misogynistic language.”
When asked what she thought about Cummings’s WhatsApp messages, and Johnson’s apparent failure to act, she replied: “It is just miles away from what is right or proper or decent, or what the country deserves.”
In the latest inquiry hearing laying bare the extent of conflict and dysfunction inside Downing Street during the pandemic, MacNamara spoke of a “toxic environment” where female civil servants found they had “become invisible overnight”. They were spoken over or ignored, she said, while meetings in Downing Street were dominated by men and the country went without the input of women, including experts, at a time when it needed it the most.
Along with her criticism of Johnson and Cummings, there were accusations from MacNamara about the performance of the then health secretary, Matthew Hancock. She said he had routinely claimed in meetings that certain things were going to happen, or certain things were happening, but it had transpired that they were not.
When asked by Andrew O’Connor KC, for the inquiry, if Hancock was “regularly telling people things that they later discovered were not true”, she replied: “Yes.”
Until now, MacNamara has been best known to the public for her role in Partygate, where she apologised in April last year for her “error of judgment” after being fined by police for attending a party in the Cabinet Office during lockdown. She provided a karaoke machine for the event, which is understood to have been one of the most raucous gatherings under investigation.
She told the inquiry that she had “profound regret” about the situation, but had to be reminded by O’Connor that she was at Downing Street during one of the events that had led to fines after she claimed: “I definitely wasn’t partying in No 10.”
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She said she had been worried about the “kind of culture” that staff were working in and the need for them to have space to spend time together. “My profound regret is for the damage that has been caused to so many people because of it, as well as just the mortifying experience of seeing what that looks like, and how rightly offended everybody is, in retrospect,” she said.
MacNamara suggested rules had been being broken on a daily basis just in the conduct of government business. There was “one meeting [a cabinet meeting] where we absolutely adhered to the guidance to the letter and everybody moaned about it and tried to change repeatedly,” she said. “So, I know how exceptional it was to really, really, really properly follow the guidance. I think that, in retrospect, obviously, all sorts of things were wrong.”
Earlier, the inquiry heard MacNamara characterise the early approach of Boris Johnson and those around him when it came to the challenge of Covid as macho and “unbelievably bullish” confidence.
“This in itself was not a new thing, but it seemed even more so than usual. We were going to be world-beating at conquering Covid-19 as well as everything else,” she said in her statement.
