Dominic Cummings was the headline act. People know who he is and they know what he does: angry sweary self-importance combined with a messianic confidence in his own genius. Speaking as Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, his testimony yesterday was a political blockbuster, complete with a new dictionary of Thick of It-style political abuse.
Today’s testimony, by former deputy Cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara, seemed like it would be more sedate and restrained. There was no talk of “useless fuckpigs”. There were no blatant attempts at assassinations of political enemies. There was no vein-bulging emotional hatred.
But what we heard was ultimately much, much worse. It was a thorough, judicious, objective description of a failure of governance on a near-biblical level. And it did not come from someone with an axe to grind. It was damning in a way that Cummings never could be, because she had minimised any sense of personal animosity and strategic calculation.
MacNamara was measured, calm, even remorseful. It goes without saying that Cummings despised her and spoke of her in heavily misogynistic tones when he was in government. He was always “dodging stilettos from that c**t”, he told Boris Johnson on WhatsApp. He wanted to “handcuff her”. But now it was her time in the witness box. And she laid it out step by step: every failure, every superficial thought, every irresponsibility, every unforced error, every personal and organisational inadequacy.
On 13 March 2020, MacNamara had walked into the Prime Minister’s study. “I have come through here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you that I think we are absolutely fucked,” she said. “I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people.” Her testimony was the story of how that situation was allowed to develop.
She outlined how Johnson’s response to the early months of the Covid outbreak was typified by machismo, ignorance and baseless confidence. During those key weeks between January and March 2020, the evidence from overseas became overwhelming. It was increasingly clear we were facing a profound threat to British people’s lives. But Johnson’s private behaviour seems to have been identical to his public persona: the “cake and eat it” prime minister, the “boosterism” prime minister, the man who engaged in jolly old England self-satisfaction over evidence and sustained thought.
“Mr Johnson was very confident the UK would sail through,” MacNamara said. He spent much of the time “laughing at the Italians”, despite that country providing an early test-case for what was about to hit Britain. She was “particularly bothered by the supreme confidence [she] had heard”. There was, as far as she could tell, no caution. There was no checking of national preparedness. It was “completely and utterly absent”.
This all took place in an atmosphere of intense sexism. She spoke of “very obvious sexist treatment” where “there were no women contributing to the policy discussions”. The dominant culture, she said, was one in which “debate and discussion was limited, junior people were talked over, everything was contaminated by ego”. This was not fundamentally an institutional problem. It was the result of the person in charge. “When I think about working for [Theresa 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.”
This wasn’t just a problem on the basis of fair treatment. It contributed to the governmental failure. It turned a conversation which should have been meritocratic and evidence-led into one dominated by outsized male egos battling one another for supremacy.
But the problems did not all originate with Johnson or his working culture. They were deeper than that. They went right into the heart of the British state. There was, quite simply, no plan to deal with this pandemic.
Other places did have a plan. Eurozone contingency documents were thorough and thought-through. They had an operations manual, a meetings manual, a communications manual. It was a plan in the normal sense of the word: outlining who was going to do what by when as part of a set strategy. Britain, on the other hand, had nothing. According to MacNamara, a much-vaunted Department of Health action plan was basically just a communications strategy document.
The Cabinet office was told over and over again by health secretary Matt Hancock that there were plans in place. “Was there any ambiguity looking back?” MacNamara was asked. “No,” she replied. “I assumed he’d seen and been through them and thought they were adequate.” In reality, those plans did not exist.
Matt Hancock is of course to blame for giving this impression. He was demonstrably incapable of delivering to a competent standard during a moment of acute national severity. But the problem is more deep-seated than that. It is about a civil service that simply is not delivering, due to lack of hard science knowledge, absence of due diligence, and a cultural preference for generalism over specialist skills.
These issues have tormented the organisation for decades. They were the findings of the 1968 Fulton report, which attacked “the cult of the generalist” in the British civil service. But very little has been done about it. “We were collectively under-confident in being able to ask questions about science,” MacNamara admitted.
After yesterday’s petulant theatrics, this is the real meat of the inquiry. Cummings is a teenager sulking in his bedroom, out of his mind with rage at people’s failure to recognise his own supposed genius. But what we saw today was far more meaningful. It was an objective account of a country whose governance structures were corroded and weak, and which was then lumped with a catastrophically inappropriate prime minister at the worst possible moment.
When he was in power, Johnson liked to claim that he got “the big calls right”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s testimony should be his reputational tombstone.
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