It’s a bleak reflection on 2023 that the Covid inquiry – painstakingly detailing how sloppy, hubris-fuelled mismanagement led to thousands of deaths – passes for light relief in current affairs, but it sort of does. I feel bad enjoying any element of the back-stabbing, score-settling and general squirming: it’s a reminder of how noisy, macho gamification of public life characterised the Johnson administration and of the quiet private tragedies that accompanied it. Even so, there’s a grim satisfaction in hearing all those unguarded WhatsApps and meeting notes flatly read out confirming, yes, they were just as bad as we suspected; everyone knew Boris Johnson was a callously catastrophic PM, Matt Hancock was a liability and Rishi Sunak’s “Eat out to help out” was face-palm folly.
Anyway, the recent colourful “useless fuckpigs” and “magic hairdryer” phase has given me an earworm. Helen MacNamara’s understatedly devastating evidence on the damage wreaked by an “unbelievably bullish” Downing Street culture that failed to consider, respect or listen to women, combined with all those testosterone-heavy, shouty WhatsApps, reminded me of a video that keeps flitting across Instagram. It’s Belgian, it’s gone semi-viral and it features two female performers in black and pink doing a stompy dance while shouting “Frustrated man in politics, take some fucking therapy / Angry woman in therapy, get involved in politics” against an insistent beat.
Once heard, it’s impossible to shake; it plays in my head whenever I watch the news. I realised I was muttering it to myself the wrong way (angry man/frustrated woman) watching the inquiry, but either works. Frustrated/angry men grandstanding or sending vituperative one-upping WhatsApps, while frustrated/angry women watched, sidelined and ignored. The result? “Exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences,” as MacNamara puts it in her measured, ex-civil servant’s language. The wrong people were in charge and the dancing Belgians are right: we desperately need more women channelling their anger into politics. The problem is, when you see these unedifying shenanigans exposed and hear what MacNamara and colleagues were forced to deal with, the prospect seems utterly unappealing.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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