Britain’s most senior female civil servant during the Covid pandemic has responded to text messages from Dominic Cummings revealed by the inquiry, in which he referred to her as a “c***”.
Helen MacNamara spent much of this morning criticising the “macho” culture in No. 10, and spoke out about how it became worse during the height of the pandemic.
Giving his evidence yesterday, Mr Cummings was confronted with a text sent to Boris Johnson and others, in which he warned: “I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building.
“I don’t care how it is done but that woman must be out of our hair – we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that c***.”
Asked whether Mr Cummings was part of a “toxic” No. 10 culture, Ms MacNamara said the messages had been “horrible to read”, describing them as “violent and misogynistic”.
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She added they were “both surprising and not surprising. I don’t know which is worse”.
She explained the dual reasons behind Mr Cummings’s frustration with her, namely around hiring and firing issues.
Mr Cummings believed she was getting in the way of appointing the now-ennobled Lord Frost as National Security Advisor, with Ms MacNamara saying he should be a minister in the lords rather than a civil service appointment.
He also accused her of sacking special advisors, something she denies she ever did and “would never be my role”.
Ms MacNamara told the inquiry that No. 10 “wasn’t a pleasant place to work”.
She added that she was “surprised” Boris Johnson didn’t pick him up Mr Cummings’s language, something that was “miles away from what is right or proper or decent or what the country deserves”.
Shortly before the inquiry turned to Mr Cummings’s swear-laden email attacking Ms MacNamara, he posted on X (formerly Twitter) claiming “90 percent of the people in the meetings Helen discusses were civil servants who were appointed & managed by other civil servants (not by PM/SpAds/ministers)”.
He accused the inquiry of ignoring that young women in the Prime Minister’s office complained to him and others in the summer of 2020 “about senior officials in the Cabinet Office”.
The inquiry has largely focussed on the culture in No. 10 today, with Ms MacNamara describing a “confident and macho” culture in Downing Street at the very start of the pandemic.
She accused Mr Johnson of mocking the Italians, for having to close schools among other public health measures, and his team boasting: “We are going to be world-beating in conquering Covid as well as everything else.”
She added there was a “de facto assumption that we were going to be great”.
Ms MacNamara argued she could not see such a sexist culture emerging during the pandemic had Theresa May still been the Prime Minister.
She also claimed some female civil servants broke down in tears during the pandemic and voiced frustrations about male civil servants speaking over them or not letting them speak in meetings.
The then-deputy Cabinet Secretary says she regrets failing to secure counselling for female civil servants, and the “obvious sexist treatment” they were experiencing.
This morning Mr Cummings also attacked journalists, and others in Westminster, for focussing on his language and not “the underlying issues of what they were doing killing people”.
“The media want you to focus on swearing, not how the establishment killed >100k and f***ed the economy”.
