Boris Johnson 'didn't like leaving study for Covid meetings', top official says
Boris Johnson did not like attending Cobra meetings in the pandemic as he did not want to leave his study, a former senior Government official will tell the Covid Inquiry this week.
Helen MacNamara, who was Deputy Cabinet Secretary, will reveal how the former PM “never warmed” to the emergency response committee gathering as he did not feel they were his “territory”. Mr Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings at the beginning of 2020 as the Government failed to adequately prepare for the pandemic.
The Covid Inquiry this week will hear testimony from Mr Johnson’s most senior officials at the time, including Dominic Cummings, ex-communications chief Lee Cain and Ms MacNamara.
In a witness statement, submitted as evidence before her appearance on Wednesday, the former Deputy Cabinet Secretary wrote: “One of the challenges was recognising the need to shift up into another gear… We were slow to move at every point. In early March it felt like the crisis accelerated exponentially and the system was always operating in too low a gear.”
She added: “There was no time to plan and prepare… all of the focus was on sprinting to catch up with where we should have been. This was made harder in that it was also important to not look like this was the case given the importance of maintaining public confidence. Looking back I think it might have been better to share more widely within Whitehall how bad it looked to us.”
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Ms MacNamara, who was the second most senior civil servant, told how the first two weeks of March 2020 were “consumed by business as usual”, which she admitted “looks odd in retrospect”. She said that she was dealing with other issues including the investigation into alleged bullying by then Home Secretary Priti Patel and a Government proposal to move the House of Lords to York.
In her statement, Ms MacNamara told how Cobra meetings - or COBR meetings as they are officially known as an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room - did not appeal to Mr Johnson. She wrote: “One of the things we should have done earlier is move away from the COBR decision making structure. Mr Johnson had never warmed to COBR - it did not suit his working style to come through to the basement of the Cabinet Office, away from his study and his political team.
“Unusually in my experience of Prime Ministers, he clearly felt it was not his territory. As the Covid-19 situation became more immediately it was not working and definitely would not work as the crisis worsened. It was not the right set-up for the Prime Minister to be able to ask the right questions and have frank and full discussions.”
Ms MacNamara left the civil service in February 2021 and joined the Premier League, although she has since resigned from that job too.
In April last year she apologised for an "error of judgement" after being fined by the Metropolitan Police for attending a lockdown-breaking party held in the Cabinet Office in June 2020. The Sue Gray report named Ms MacNamara as the government official who brought a karaoke party to the event, which was organised as a leaving do for another civil servant. The “raucous” gathering, which continued until 3:13am the next morning, ended with one individual being sick and two others being involved in a physical altercation.
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