Top aide claims women lost lives in pandemic as macho No10 focused on hunting
Women lost their lives in the pandemic as “macho” No10 spent too much time thinking about hunting and shooting instead of domestic violence and childcare, a top official has warned.
Helen MacNamara, who was Britain’s most senior female civil servant, said Boris Johnson let the country down by not tackling the "toxic" culture he presided over.
The former Deputy Cabinet Secretary accused ministers including Matt Hancock of displaying "nuclear levels" of overconfidence. Giving evidence to the Covid Inquiry, she recalled an occasion early in the pandemic when she asked how the Health Secretary faring and he told her he was “loving responsibility”. “To demonstrate this [he] took up a batsman's stance outside the Cabinet Room and said 'they bowl them at me, I knock them away',” she added.
The Inquiry has been shown WhatsApp messages from Dominic Cummings to Boris Johnson in which he said he wanted Ms MacNamara "out of our hair" as he no longer wanted to dodge “stilettos from that c**t". As she appeared today, the former official said the messages were "horrible to read", but she was not surprised because of the culture in No10.
In an email to civil service colleagues in April 2020, Ms MacNamara raised concerns that the failure to include women in decision making had led to problems, including the lack of provision for domestic abuse victims during the first lockdown. "It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this," she wrote. Ms MacNamara highlighted how most PPE was not designed for female bodies even though 77% of NHS are women.
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In a written statement, Ms MacNamara said: “The exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures. There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks of how people look after each other in families and communities. There was not enough thinking about the impact on single parents of some of the restrictions.”
She added: “There was a disproportionate amount of attention given to more male pursuits in terms of the impact of restrictions and then the lessening of the same (football, hunting, shooting and fishing).”
Ms MacNamara also argued that senior Government figures could not comprehend the experience of most children in the country, who are state school educated, because of the "privileges" of their own families. Early in the pandemic, she said No10 displayed an “unbelievably bullish” approach as Mr Johnson believed they would “sail through” the pandemic.
Ms MacNamara, who was fined by the police after she provided a karaoke machine for a lockdown-busting Whitehall leaving do in June 2020, said "hundreds of civil servants and potentially ministers" were on the wrong side of the line when it came to following the rules. "Actually, I would find it hard to pick one day when the regulations were followed properly inside that building (No10)," she added.
After leaving the civil service in February 2021, Ms MacNamara joined the Premier League, although she has since resigned from that job too.
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