Afternoon summary
Helen MacNamara, a former senior Downing Street civil servant, has criticised Boris Johnson for failing to act against his former top adviser Dominic Cummings when he used what she described as “violent and misogynistic language” against her. She has been giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. Matthew Weaver has the highlights from her evidence here.
Updated
Kemi Badenoch claims 'safetyism' holding back British growth
Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, has claimed that what she calls “safetyism” is helping to hold back British growth.
She made the comments today in a Q&A at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London, a three-day event with rightwing international speakers, particularly from the US.
In a news release summarising her remarks, the ARC says:
Speaking at the third day of the inaugural ARC conference, business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch MP called for the UK to scale back government intervention and roll back a culture of ‘safetyism’ in a bid to boost the UK’s entrepreneurship.
In an interview with the UnHerd editor, Freddie Sayers, Badenoch said that “the state itself is doing more than it ever used to do before. We ask the government to intervene in things that it never used to intervene before.”
“There has been a fundamental cultural shift around our attitude around risk and what I call safetyism,” Badenoch said, responding to a question on causes of the UK’s economic malaise. “We talk about risk as if it’s a bad thing rather than something that generates [reward].”
She was also asked if she wanted to emulate the sort of “war on woke” being waged in the US by the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis. In response, she did not fully endorse his approach, but she said she would like the UK government to be less “shy” about setting out its vision.
"There is a role for government in shaping culture...and we have become a little bit shy about doing that for several decades... However we must again be careful about overcorrecting."
— The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (@arc_forum) November 1, 2023
UK Business Secretary @KemiBadenoch speaking with @freddiesayers on good governance and free… pic.twitter.com/2F9YJzQYzB
Updated
How Boris Johnson wanted to 'dead cat' Covid in autumn 2020 because he was fed up with issue
Boris Johnson is credited with introducing the world to the notion of the “dead cat” strategy. The phrase itself came from Johnson’s friend Lynton Crosby, the Australian political consultant, but it was Johnson who made the term famous when he wrote about it in the Telegraph 10 years ago. Now anything in politics that even looks vaguely like a distraction strategy is described as a “dead cat”.
According to Dominic Cummings’ witness statement, in the autumn of 2020 Johnson said he wanted to “dead cat” Covid because he was fed up with the issue. Cummings told him (rightly) this would never work.
Updated
Johnson asked scientists about ‘special hairdryer to kill Covid’, says Cummings
Boris Johnson asked the top scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a “special hairdryer” up the nose, according to Dominic Cummings in his witness statement to the Covid inquiry. Aletha Adu has the story.
Sunak 'quite sceptical' about paying compensation to workers who had to isolate, inquiry told
Rishi Sunak, the then chancellor, was “quite sceptical” about the case for paying compensation to people who missed work because they needed to isolate because they had Covid, the inquiry was told.
David Halpern, the former head of the behavioural insights team, made the comment in an email shown during the hearing.
Asked about the comment, Halpern said he did not talk to Sunak himself about this, but that he did talk to Treasury officials. He said it was the job of the Treasury to be reluctant to spend public money. He said he thought the Treasury would not agree to making sick pay more generous, because that would involve a “deadweight” cost, with more generous payments going to people who would comply with Covid isolation rules anyway. But he said he thought the Treasury would be more open to hardship payments to the low-paid, administered by local authorities.
The inquiry has now finished for the day.
Updated
Kate Forbes adds to pressure on Sturgeon by saying she kept all her Covid WhatsApp messages
Kate Forbes, the former Scottish finance secretary under Nicola Sturgeon, has said she had kept all her WhatsApp messages from the Covid pandemic because “it was clear [there] would be an inquiry” into the government’s handling of the crisis.
Forbes, a noted critic of Sturgeon’s who narrowly lost the Scottish National party leadership election to Humza Yousaf, further increased pressure on Sturgeon to explain whether or not she had kept her messages. It has been reported most or nearly were deleted.
Sturgeon, the former first minister was asked four times yesterday whether she had deleted the messages, and refused to say. She acknowledged she would disclose that to the UK Covid inquiry: “I will be very clear to the inquiry what I hold and what I don’t hold and why that is the case.”
Speaking to reporters at Holyrood on Wednesday, Forbes said: “I think it’s incumbent on each of us to give an account for our own actions and our own decisions.”
Forbes’s intervention also raises further questions about Yousaf’s assertion earlier this week that Scottish government policy required the deletion of old WhatsApp messages every 30 days. Despite claiming that policy was in place, Yousaf has said he also kept all his messages.
Forbes said:
Well, I suppose my approach has been that where something is relevant to my role as minister, I have retained it.
[It] is really critical that the Covid inquiries provide answers to all those that were affected during the Covid years. And I think that calls for the greatest possible source of information, correspondence and evidence, and so on.
Updated
At the Covid inquiry David Halpern, the former head of the Behavioural Insights Team, is giving evidence. Asked for his reaction to Dominic Cummings breaching lockdown rules when he took his family from London to County Durham, and then went on his eyesight-testing trip to Barnard Castle, Halpern said it was “atrocious”.
He said countries could either have a principles-based approach to dealing with Covid (Japan was an example – it told people to avoid the three C’s, crowds, closed spaces and close contact), or a rules-based approach. The UK had a rules-based approach. Halpern said, if rules were broken, there should be consequences. But the Cummings episode blew a hole in that because he was subjected to no sanctions.
But Halpern said the one positive was that, after the Cummings affair, most people continued to follow the rule. That was because people were more keen to follow the example set by their neighbours, co-workers and fellow commuters than someone in Downing Street, he said.
Updated
Cummings claims Johnson's wife Carrie exacerbated his indecision - and PM sometimes wrongly blamed her for U-turns
The Covid inquiry has published the text of Dominic Cummings’ witness statement. It runs to 114 pages, and is not easily searchable.
Cummings was in part forced out of No 10 because he lost a power struggle with Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie (still his fiancée when Covid struck in 2020), and, although this feud did not come up in the evidence session yesterday, in his witness statement Cummings restates his claim that she was a negative influence on the PM. He claims that she exacerbated Johnson’s indecision problem. But he also claims Johnson himself sometimes blamed her unfairly for U-turns for which she was not to blame.
In this passage Cummings is referring to WhatsApp messages about Carrie published last month.
Updated
Scottish Labour has significantly increased its lead over the Scottish National party, taking a six-point lead over its rivals, according to a respected academic survey from the Scottish Election Study.
Its quarterly Scoop poll put Labour on 38% and the SNP on 32%, after don’t knows were removed, giving Labour its largest lead since 2010 and appearing to confirm a consistent rise in support for Keir Starmer’s party in Scotland.
The Scoop data suggests undecided voters are switching to Labour, as have a fifth of SNP voters, 38% of Liberal Democrat voters and nearly a fifth of Conservative voters. Two-thirds of Scottish voters expect Labour to win the next general election.
The poll, conducted by YouGov, was carried out in late October after Humza Yousaf’s first national conference as SNP leader, where he unveiled a council tax freeze, and after his party’s devastating defeat in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West byelection.
Unfortunately for Yousaf, Scoop found voter allegiance to the SNP has slipped significantly: only 55% of voters who backed the SNP in the 2019 general election plan to at the next election. The Tories fared far worse: only 48% of their voters will back them again.
The Scottish government’s reputation among voters has also fallen, YouGov found. It had a minus 20 satisfaction rating, although that remains far better than Rishi Sunak’s administration in London. The UK government’s satisfaction rating was an Arctic -68.
The Scottish Election Study is based at the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Updated
Heather Hallett, the chair, asks a final question. She wants to know what powers special advisers have.
MacNamara says in theory special advisers cannot direct civil servants. She says in practice they can, if a special adviser asks for something on behalf of the PM. But she says during this period sometimes advisers were, from their own initiative, asking civil servants to act.
And that’s the end of MacNamara’s evidence.
Updated
Johnson 'rarely accepted that to govern is to choose', MacNamara says
O’Connor quotes from another passage in MacNamara’s witness statement. In it MacNamara said:
The prime minister rarely accepted that to govern is to choose. He really did want it all and changed his mind often.
The decision-making swung between two extremes, the prime minister’s undoubted liberal instincts and then the extremes of shutting everything down, when in reality all of the discussion and debate and choices were in the middle.
Updated
O’Connor turns to schools. He says that, in her witness statement, MacNamara says that, after the permanent secretary at the Department for Education was forced to resign over the exam grading fiasco, she was told by Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, that Boris Johnson intended to ensure that Gavin Wiliamson, the education secretary, would also have to move at some point soon.
Updated
O’Connor says MacNamara also raised the issue of whether PPE was designed to fit women’s bodies. She addressed this in her witness statement.
MacNamara says this issue eventually got raised by the PM in a meeting. She says she thinks a colleague persuaded the PM to raise this issue because that was the only means of getting a response.
Getting No 10 to focus on domestic violence 'far too difficult' during Covid, says MacNamara
MacNamara says she thinks more people will have been harmed as a result of domestic abuse during lockdown. An email is shown in which she said: “It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this.”
O’Connor shows another extract from her witness statement addressing this. In it MacNamara says it was “far too difficult” to get colleagues in No 10 to focus on domestic violence.
UPDATE: MacNamara said:
People don’t want to think about these things, so you don’t want to think that awful things happen to children and partners and parents in their own home.
If you are a more experienced civil servant … you have a different sense of these things and I think it goes to who is involved and advising in decision-making, and are they able to bring the full gamut of what the state actually knows about what sometimes happens.
I feel that it was quite lopsided at this point. We were looking at harm through a very narrow lens without realising that of course there can be all sorts of consequences of other things you can’t see.
Updated
Lack of 'female perspective' in No 10 created problems with Covid policymaking, inquiry hears
O’Connor presents an extract from MacNamara’s witness statement in which she said the lack of a “female perspective” in No 10 created a problem in Covid policymaking. She suggests there was more focus on issues like shooting and football than domestic abuse or pregnancy as a result.
Updated
MacNamara resumes giving evidence to Covid inquiry
Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, is back giving evidence at the Covid inquiry.
Andrew O’Connor, counsel for the inquiry, asks about a passage in her witness statement where she said that, although colleagues were sympathetic to the idea that some groups were suffering disproportionately because of Covid, there was an assumption that these were “naturally occuring” consequences.
MacNamara says she was concerned that people did not appreciate the extent to which these inequalities were related to government decisions.
Updated
MacNamara says situation that led to her Partygate fine 'much more complex' than reports suggest
In her evidence this morning Helen MacNamara said she felt “profound regret” about the leaving party with karaoke machine that led to her being fined for breaking lockdown rules. She said:
My profound regret is for the damage that’s been caused to so many people because of it, as well as just the mortifying experience of seeing what that looks like and how rightly offended everybody is in retrospect.
I absolutely knew and thought it was actually important for there to be space for – particularly the private office – to be able to gather together and spend time together.
That was entirely because of the kind of culture that they were working in and entirely because I was really worried about individuals breaking and suffering, and whether they were going to be OK, and how important their colleagues were to each other.
I’m saying none of that in excuse of my own misjudgment. I’m saying none of that in excuse of thinking any of these things were OK. But it was a much more complex situation than has allowed to be presented for lots of different reasons.
Updated
In her evidence to the inquiry Helen MacNamara said that at one point Matt Hancock, the health secretary, posed as a batsman while discussing Covid. In her witness statement she said:
He reassured me that he was ‘loving responsibility’ and to demonstrate this took up a batsman’s stance outside the cabinet room and said: ‘They bowl them at me, I knock them away.’
MacNamara said the anecdote said something about Hancock’s over-confidence. She said:
It does partly go back to my point about nuclear levels of confidence that were being deployed, which I do think is a problem.
It really stuck with me, this moment, and I thought … I have tried throughout this statement to give you the most honest and best account I can of what it was like to be there, because I think that is the best service that I can do in terms of you being able to come to some conclusions.
Updated
King Charles recorded a video message to be played at the opening session of the AI safety summit taking place at Bletchley Park. He said:
Transitions, like the one AI is heralding, always present profound challenges; especially in preparing for unintended consequences. It is incumbent on those with responsibility to meet these challenges: to protect people’s privacy and livelihoods, which are essential to both our economic and psychological well-being, to secure our democracies from harm, and to ensure the benefits of new technology are shared by all.
I have always believed in the importance of holding a conversation both within and across societies to address such great challenges; of bringing governments and the public sector together with civil society and the private sector in that conversation, adhering to the values, tenets of faith and laws that we all hold so dear. That is how the international community has sought to tackle climate change, to light a path to net zero, and safeguard the future of our planet. We must similarly address the risks presented by AI with a sense of urgency, unity and collective strength.
Updated
In his commentary on Helen MacNamara’s evidence this morning on his Substack blog, Dominic Cummings has posted this about his language about her.
Re my terrible language referring to Helen and others… Yes, my language is bad. But it’s mental to focus on my language rather than the fact that the Cabinet Office *was killing people* by pulling people out of emergency covid work to deal with Cabinet Office HR fuckups and ludicrous legal cases about the fuckups of the first wave! Kafka does not do this justice. And I guess this will never be addressed by the Inquiry. Too mental for people to get their heads around …
This does not really address her point that he was being vindictive because she had legitimate objections to how he wanted to deal with two issues. (See 12.25pm.)
MacNamara says Matt Hancock was regularly telling No 10 things 'they later discovered weren't true'
O’Connor asked about Matt Hancock. He produced an extract from MacNamara’s witness statement in which she said people were becoming increasingly concerned that, when he gave assurances about what the Department of Health was doing, he was wrong.
O’Connor asks is MacNamara saying “Mr Hancock regularly was telling people things that they later discovered weren’t true”. MacNamara replies: “Yes.”
The hearing has now stopped for lunch. MacNamara’s evidence was due to finish by now, but O’Connor says he has more questions. They will resume at 1.55pm.
UPDATE: PA Media has more on this exchange. It reports:
Helen MacNamara said there was a “pattern” of “being reassured that something was absolutely fine” by former health secretary Matt Hancock before discovering it was “very, very far from fine”.
She said Hancock has “time and time again” without “any ambiguity” told the cabinet that plans were in place during the pandemic, which did not turn out to be the case.
Andrew O’Connor KC asked: “Would it be fair to say you were surprised, let down, when you realised that what he had said wasn’t actually true?”
“I was surprised, yes,” MacNamara replied.
Asked whether she believed Hancock was not saying things that were true, she said: “It’s definitely the view in government. I think it’s fair to say it’s what we experienced. So that what was said in a meeting as actually being under control or going to be delivered, or something that was fine, that then subsequently, a matter of days sometimes, or sometimes weeks later, that we’d discover that that wasn’t in fact the case.”
Updated
Johnson objected to regular meetings with first ministers because it would make UK look like 'mini EU', inquiry hears
MacNamara is now being asked about relations with the devolved administrations or governments.
O’Connor shows an extract from Boris Johnson’s witness statement to the inquiry saying he was opposed to holding joint ministerial committee (JMC) meetings with the first ministers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Johnson said it would be “optically wrong” for the PM to have regularly meetings like that, because that would make the UK look like a “mini EU”.
MacNamara says she knew Johnson had a difficult relationship with Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister. But she says she did think JMC meetings would take place.
Shadow cabinet ministers sometimes got more chance to question science advisers than cabinet did, inquiry hears
At one point members of the shadow cabinet were getting more opportunity to question Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, 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 witness statement.
Updated
MacNamara says hundreds of civil servants, and ministers, now think they may have broken Covid rules
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.
UPDATE: MacNamara said:
I am certain that there are hundreds of civil servants and potentially ministers who in retrospect think they were the wrong side of that line”.
I really hope there’s been some mature conversation about that, because that sort of thing, if it’s not addressed, is corrosive, actually, in a culture.
Updated
MacNamara says she does not think there was any single day when Covid guidance was fully followed in No 10
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 and tried to change it repeatedly.
So I know how exceptional it was to really properly follow the guidance.
Updated
MacNamara says Cummings' 'misogynist' abuse partly response to her blocking his attempt to cover up how he sacked aide
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 the 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’ messages, she says they were “horrible to read” and “both surprising and not surprising”.
Cummings was frustrated with her at the time, she says.
But she says all she was doing was working for the PM, and defending his 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”.
Updated
Women working in No 10 felt 'invisible' because of macho culture, inquiry hears
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”.
UPDATE: In her witness statement MacNamara said:
Pre-Covid and I would not have characterised No 10 or the Cabinet Office as a particularly abnormally sexist environment in the context of Whitehall and Westminster (Whitehall and Westminster are endemically sexist environments), but what started as a murmur became a roar over the next couple of weeks. Not only were there 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.
Expanding on her statement in evidence, MacNamara said:
It was really, really obvious that not only were there hardly any women there, that when they were there, you know, they had to turn their screens off … on the Zoom meeting or they were sitting in the back row or – there just weren’t any women talking.
Updated
MacNamara says 'superhero bunfight' culture at No 10 would never have happened under Theresa May
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.
MacNamara 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 overconfidence 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.
Updated
O’Connor presents a page from MacNamara’s witness statement saying it took seven months for No 10 to arrange to place a hand sanitiser at the door between No 10 and the Cabinet Office, where people had to use a keypad to get the door to open. MacNamara says she was surprised by how long this took. She hopes Downing Street would deal with an issue like this much more effectively now, she says.
O’Connor also shows a page from an internal Q&A that MacNamara wrote on what might happen if the PM got more ill. “God knows,” she said.
MacNamara says she thinks better arrangements are now in place to deal with what might happen if the PM is seriously ill.
No 10 had to 'make up' plan for what would happen when PM incapacitated, inquiry hears
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 times 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.
Updated
In a fresh update on his Substack blog, Dominic Cummings, who is mostly agreeing with Helen MacNamara’s evidence, says he does not agree with what she was saying about prisons. (See 11.20am.) He explains:
My memory on prisons is different to Helen. The reason for the delay on prisoners was because Buckland wanted to let out some of the worst violent criminals! This was elevated to the PM as it would obviously be a massive big deal. The PM stopped this. In my opinion, Boris was right on this.
MacNamara concerned about 'absence of humanity' being feature of government's response to Covid
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.
MacNamara suggests, once No 10 realised lockdown necessary, it could not have happened faster 'in safe way'
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.
Back in the inquiry, O’Connor presents another extract from MacNamara’s witness statement in which she quotes an account by Dominic Cummings who recalls her coming into the office on Friday 13 March saying that the country was “absolutely fucked” and that thousands of people were going to die. Cummings has cited this as a very positive intervention that helped to trigger an urgent rethink.
MacNamara says this is an accurate account. She said she had been in meetings that day, including a briefing for the opposition, and that she had been “more alarmed rather than reassured” by what she had heard from the government side. She says it was alarming.
And it was a sense of foreboding, like I hope nobody sitting in that office ever has that again. Actually, it was a very, very scary experience. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind at that point that we were heading for a total disaster. And what we had to do was do everything in our power to make it impact as little as possible in the time we had available in the circumstances.
It seems like I’ve got new competition in the liveblogging arena. Dominic Cummings is posting a running commentary on Helen MacNamara’s evidence on his Substack account. In his first post he says she was right about the Cabinet Office being unhelpful on documentation (see 10.16am) and right about No 10 being much too confident on the eve of the pandemic (see 10.36am).
Helen right that the Cabinet Office has failed to follow the orders given in 2020 to keep records of everything. I asked for this to happen. So did Helen. Yet the Cabinet Office has destroyed a lot of documents – eg some documents that I have accidental copies of do not show up in official records.
Agree with Helen that the ‘world-beating’, ‘we’re best prepared in world’ etc mindset was a nightmare, delusional. I’d go further than has and say this general approach definitely undermined an effective response. But also important to note – this was not just Boris, this was the attitude of *DHSC and Cabinet Office* on pandemic preparations too.
Helen is saying what I said – *the Cabinet Office had no plan for how the centre would run the crisis*. Everybody was assuming that No10/Cabinet Office would be running crisis response. But the Cabinet Office thought it was just ‘coordinating’ other parts of government running the response. THIS HAS STILL NOT SUNK IN IN SW1!!
As usual, Cummings is also contemptuous of mainstream media coverage of what he said.
MSM largely useless coverage of Inquiry, obsessed on trivia, determined as always to ignore management/structures & how power worked & still works … I’ll post updates on Inquiry, other witnesses etc
MSM largely useless coverage of Inquiry, obsessed on trivia, determined as always to ignore management/structures & how power worked & still works... I'll post updates on Inquiry, other witnesses etc... https://t.co/HTKiMjiWCw
— Dominic Cummings (@Dominic2306) November 1, 2023
Updated
Matt Hancock assured cabinet 'time and time again' he had plan to deal with Covid, inquiry hears
Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, told cabinet “time and time again” shortly before the pandemic struck that the government had plans in place to deal with Covid, MacNamara said in her witness statement to the inquiry. In her oral evidence, she says she heard Hancock say this in person, and assumed he was right, but that these plans never materialised.
Yesterday Lee Cain, Johnson’s director of communications in 2020, told the inquiry that the Covid action plan published by the government in early March was concerning because anyone reading it properly would have realised that it wasn’t a proper plan, and that its publication implied no proper plan actually existed.
In her witness statement MacNamara makes much the same point. She says it was an “extraordinary document” because it was so misleading.
Updated
MacNamara tells inquiry she was concerned about Johnson's 'jovial tone' about Covid threat in early March 2020
O’Connor presents another extract from MacNamara’s witness statement, describing Boris Johnson’s approach to Covid in January and early February. MacNamara says at that point Johnson was “very confident” that the UK would “sail through” the Covid crisis.
O’Connor then quotes another extract from the witness statement (this time not shown on screen). In it she says the tone adopted at the No 10 early morning that she attended was that Britain was going to be “world beating and conquering Covid-19, as well as everything else”.
MacNamara says she was concerned by this over confidence.
And then O’Connor presents another extract from the witness statement. It describes a point in early March, and MacNamara says she was concerned by the “jovial tone” adopted in No 10, which she says did not fit with the concerns she had picked up, from school WhatsApp groups, that ordinary people had about the virus.
Updated
O’Connor shows an extract from MacNamara’s witness statement. In it, she says the government was already “on the back foot” in January 2020 because of Brexit. And she says the relationship between the civil service and Boris Johnson’s team was a “low trust environment”.
In her oral evidence MacNamara does also say that preparing for a possible no deal Brexit had been “immensely valuable” in terms of preparing for Covid.
Helen MacNamara tells inquiry Cabinet Office made it 'extraordinarily difficult' for her to access past Covid paperwork
At the Covid inquiry Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, is giving evidence now.
Andrew O’Connor KC is questioning her.
MacNamara says public inquiries are important. Her witness statement runs to more than 100 pages.
But she says it was “extraordinary difficult to get even the most basic pieces of information” from the Cabinet Office when she was compiling her statement.
And she says the Cabinet Office deleted her work mobile phone, which meant some messages were not available.
But most of her business was on email, she says.
A live stream of the inquiry is here:
Updated
James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, says the Foreign Office is trying to help Britons trapped in Gaza leave today via the Rafah crossing, which has opened. He posted this on X.
The Rafah crossing is likely to open today for a first group of foreign nationals.
UK teams are ready to assist British nationals as soon as they are able to leave.
It’s vital that lifesaving humanitarian aid can enter Gaza as quickly as possible.
The Rafah crossing is likely to open today for a first group of foreign nationals.
— James Cleverly🇬🇧 (@JamesCleverly) November 1, 2023
UK teams are ready to assist British nationals as soon as they are able to leave.
It’s vital that lifesaving humanitarian aid can enter Gaza as quickly as possible.
There is full coverage of developments in the Israel-Hamas war on our live blog.
Dowden refuses to say it was shocking for Johnson to describe Covid as 'nature's way of dealing with old people'
Here is the clip of Oliver Dowden telling Kay Burley on Sky News this morning that what Dominic Cummings said about Boris Johnson at the Covid inquiry was “very partial”.
"I am not going to give commentary on one individual piece of information."
— Sky News (@SkyNews) November 1, 2023
Deputy PM @OliverDowden reacts to the latest from the Covid Inquiry.https://t.co/eCL0eLKcQ4
📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/myZYuHBsQq
Burley invited Dowden to accept that what Johnson was revealed yesterday to have said about Covid being “nature’s way of dealing with old people” was “shocking”. But Dowden wouldn’t say that. He said he did not “recognise” much of the evidence given yesterday, and said he rejected in many respects what had been said.
Oliver Dowden urges people to wait until Boris Johnson presents his side of the story at Covid inquiry
Good morning. The evidence from Dominic Cummings to the Covid inquiry yesterday was not good for Boris Johnson’s reputation. The papers where he either used to be or is now a columnist have led their coverage with an anti-Cummings take, but elsewhere the headlines reflect evidence that emerged that suggests Johnson’s leadership during Covid was even more chaotic and flawed than people already thought.
Wednesday’s i - “UK’s old people should ‘accept their fate’ from Covid - Boris Johnson’s private stance revealed” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/HZ34mqrAbe
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) October 31, 2023
Wednesday’s TIMES: “Johnson: Let elderly accept fate” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/DHKt5iUeGh
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) October 31, 2023
Wednesday’s Daily MIRROR: “Boris: The Old Should Accept Their Fate” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/SdLdECau7A
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) October 31, 2023
Wednesday’s Daily RECORD: “Useless *******S Morons & ****S” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/bAKZ6OnfCv
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) October 31, 2023
There is more coming this morning when Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary who was the subject of misogynist-sounding rants by Cummings, gives evidence. (Cummings claims he wasn’t misogynist because he was just as unpleasant and offensive about men; in other words, he says he’s an equal opportunities misogynist.)
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, was on the morning interview round earlier. He wanted to talk about the PM’s AI safety summit, but inevitably he was asked about Johnson. Along with Rishi Sunak and Robert Jenrick, Dowden wrote a joint article in the Times in June 2019 endorsing Johnson for the Tory leadership on the grounds that he had “governed well” as London mayor and that he would bring “a sense of excitement and hope about what we Conservatives can do for Britain”. At the time Johnson was worried his most prominent MP supporters were cranks, and so an endorsement from mainstream high-flyers was valuable.
In the light of the new evidence to the inquiry, does Dowden have any regrets? It does not sound like it. In interviews this morning, rather than endorse the Cummings critique of Johnson’s leadership, he urged people to wait until Johnson presented his side of the story. He told Sky News:
What I think you are seeing there is very partial, one piece of evidence amongst many others. I am quite sure that when the former prime minister gives evidence he will give a full account of himself, the Cabinet Office has given a very full account of how we conducted ourselves.
I am not going to give commentary on one individual piece of information because it needs to fit in with a much wider picture of how we conducted ourselves both at the time and through the vaccine programme, and through all the different, very difficult decisions that were taken around the cost and benefits of lockdowns.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.15am: Political and tech industry leaders arrive at Bletchley Park for Rishi Sunak’s global summit on AI safety.
10am: Helen MacNamara, former deputy cabinet secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.
1.30pm: Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, takes part in a Q&A at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference.
2pm: David Halpern, former head of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry.
4pm: Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, gives a speech at a King’s Fund conference.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
Updated
