No 10 had ‘toxic culture’ during Covid and Cummings used ‘violent and misogynist’ language, says top civil servant – UK politics live | Politics

At one point members of the shadow cabinet were getting more opportunity to question the Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, on the science behind Covid policy than cabinet ministers, the inquiry hears. MacNamara was in charge of organising briefings for the opposition and she made this point in her witnesss statement.

MacNamara says it was hard for people working in No 10 to know exactly what was and was not allowed under the Covid regulations. She thinks there are “hundreds of civil servants and potentially ministers” who now in retrospect think that they did break the rules.

MacNamara is now being asked about the Partygate behaviour at No 10.

She says she does not think there was a single day when the Covid regulations were fully adhered to in No 10. Explaining why she says this, she goes on:

Being honest, I would find it hard to pick a one day when the regulations were followed properly inside that building.

And I know that because, as I’ve said in my statement, there was one meeting where we absolutely adhered to the guidance to the letter, and that was the cabinet meeting. And everybody moaned about it meant and tried to change it repeatedly.

So I know how exceptional it was to really properly follow the guidance.

O’Connor asks about the “extremely crude” language used at No 10. He says the inquiry heard this yesterday.

MacNamara says:

There was definitely a toxic culture.

Q: Did Dominic Cummings contribute to that?

MacNamara says she wants to address the comments Cummings made about her that were revealed yesterday.

She says that PM had offered her a number of permanent secretary jobs to get her out of the Cabinet Office, and she had objected to going, because she did not want to participate in something that would lead to a civil service colleague being forced out to make way for her.

As regards Cummings’s messages, she says they were “horrible to read” and “both suprising and not suprising”.

Cummings was frustrated with her at the time, she says.

But she says all she was doing was working for the PM, and defending her interests.

She says Cummings was cross about two issues. The first was her opposition to David Frost being made a permanent secretary, and being put in charge of national security, when he had been doing a highly political Brexit role previously. She says she instead thought he should become a minister in the House of Lords, which is what happened.

She says Cummings claimed MacNamara was sacking special advisers. In fact the Cabinet Office was involved in an employment tribunal caused by Cummings sacking a special adviser. She says she had told Cummings to tell the truth about what happened, and he was not happy about that.

I was insisting on him telling the truth to the employment tribunal, and he didn’t respond well to that.

MacNamara also says it was “disappointing” that Boris Johnson did not try to stop Cummings using the sort of “violent and misogynist” language that he did. She says that language was “miles away from what is right or proper or decent, or what the country deserves”.

MacNamara says when she returned to No 10 in April, after her illness, she felt the macho culture had become more extreme.

O’Connor quotes from her witness statement, in which she said:

There are numerous examples of women being ignored, excluded, not listened to or talked over. It was also clear that the female perspective was being missed in advice and decision making.

She said in the statement it felt as if women had become ‘“invisible overnight”.

O’Connor asks MacNamara about the report she wrote on how No 10 was dealing with Covid in the early days of the pandemic. Here is an extract in which she talks about the “superhero bunfight” culture.

McNamara says not everyone was behaving badly.

And she says the situation was stressful.

This was an extraordinarily pressured and difficult situation. And people were working outside of their structures outside of their competence. They were frightened.

Q: Was this related to the over-confidence you witnessed earlier in the year? (See 10.36am.)

MacNamara says she thinks there is a link. She says the culture would have been different if Theresa May had been prime minister.

If I think about working for Mrs May, I don’t think there’s any world in which we could have got from January to May and had this sort of culture because it just wasn’t there in the DNA of the organisation at that time.

The “parachuted in to save the day” culture was a problem. People arrived to help, she says. That had advantages; people wanted to help. But if you have 15 people who want to save the day, that does not make for a happy culture, she says.

Back at the Covid inquiry, O’Connor says MacNamara returned to work on 2 April 2020 after her Covid illness. Boris Johnson was already ill himself at that point, and was admitted to hospital that weekend.

O’Connor says one of MacNamara’s jobs was to deal with how government should continue in the event of Johnson being unable to give instructions. He says in her witness statement MacNamara said she had to “make it up” as she was going along. No plans were available, he says.

MacNamara says that is correct. At time it felt like working in “a dystopian nightmare”, she says. After one terrible thing, another happened.

There is “no magic cupboard” in the Cabinet Office saying what should be done in circumstances like this. But there is knowledge and precedent, she says.

O’Connor shows two pages from a document MacNamara wrote saying what would happen if Johnson could not function.

O’Connor shows two more extracts from MacNamara’s witness statement. The first is a passage about a more junior official asking her about Covid policy for prisons, and the question of whether prisoners should be released to minimise the risk of their getting coronavirus in an enclosed environment. In the statement MacNamara said she was concerned that an issue like this was coming to No 10 when it should have been a matter for the Ministry of Justice.

O’Connor then shows another passage from the witness statement in which MacNamara says this illustrated several general problems with the way Covid was being handled. One was the “absence of humanity”, she said.

At the inquiry hearing yesterday Heather Hallett, the chair, suggested the full lockdown, which did not come until Monday 23 March, should have happened earlier, given by Saturday 14 March people in No 10 were concluding a lockdown was inevitable.

But MacNamara suggests she does not think it could have happened earlier. She says:

We could not have gone any faster in a safe way.

O’Connor presses her on this and asks her if, following the 14 March meeting, she expected the lockdown to be announced sooner. She says she does not know.

At this point she had Covid herself, and was not in the office.