‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” wrote the great Germaine Greer, in 1970. But now we have the Covid inquiry.
Last week Dominic Cummings was asked about a 2020 exchange on a WhatsApp group named “Fightback”. It concerned their colleague Helen MacNamara, the deputy cabinet secretary. Cummings: “If I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit with PET [propriety and ethics team] … I will personally handcuff her and escort her out of the building.” None of the coworkers objected. “I don’t care how it is done,” Cummings elaborates, “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 cunt.” Then: “We gotta get Helen out [of] CabOff. She’s fucking up Frosty. She’s fucking up me and Case.” Etc.
The obscenities have scandalised in a way that ample, existing evidence of Johnson-era misogyny, like women’s absence from senior positions and media rounds, never did. But since, as Cummings protests, he insulted everyone, it’s as much the other language – “handcuffs”, “escort”, “that woman” – that underlines how deeply Johnson’s inner circle resented women who were not at least two of young, blonde and compliant.
MacNamara told the inquiry that Cummings was “cross” about, among other things, her insistence that he tell the truth to an employment tribunal (scheduled after another woman was “escorted” out, subsequently receiving a five-figure settlement). She thought it “disappointing” Johnson had not questioned Cummings’s language. Counsel to the inquiry confirmed there were “plenty” of WhatsApp groups featuring “that sort of abuse”. We’ll just have to guess at the less formal, conversational content.
As MacNamara said of her own vilification, the extreme misogyny exposed by the inquiry is “both surprising and not surprising”. That Johnson showed zero respect for women, to the point of not even pretending, can surprise no one familiar with his career. The Conservative party and press consciously chose leadership by the proud creator of the “tottymeter”, a workplace shagger who wrote obscenely about women, two-timed them and said they only went to university to find husbands. That the party is beset by cases of sexual misconduct is also, after promoting this satyr, unsurprising. And true love between Matt and Gina, in this context, a statistical probability.
With women either banished or, as MacNamara records, talked over, it followed that many gendered impacts of Covid and lockdown would be ignored, with grim, sometimes fatal, consequences. MacNamara says people will have died as a result. Domestic violence, children’s mental health, contraception, abortion, childbirth, enforced elderly isolation, solitary deaths, women’s additional household labour, woman-sized PPE: all were neglected or ignored. If these omissions were slow, like an all-male leadership “quad” and all-male briefings, to cause external consternation, that’s maybe because in many media organisations the government’s preoccupation with football over, say, childcare, also seemed completely normal.
What is, however, unexpected is how unreservedly Johnson’s male team, a superlatively talentless group but not otherwise exceptional, threw themselves into the grubby, feet-on-desk, woman-hating realisation of all his boyhood dreams. Given no plague and a little longer, you feel confident the lead gang would, given Johnson’s infatuation with male competition, have devised an initiation ceremony featuring bodily fluids and a battle cry.
Horrifying one-off or a lesson from recent history? Should women conclude that ostensibly harmless male peers are similarly susceptible to abusive reversal? Could male colleagues who are educated, on nodding terms with diversity and without obvious excuses for pathological misogyny – public school, being raised by wolves after maternal rejection – lack only opportunity to, like the Johnsonites, turn the clock back, then turn it back some more, maybe to when Greer was rightly acclaimed?
While employment law must offer some protection, the Covid testimony usefully raises awareness of signs that a mixed workplace may be still, like much of Westminster, only superficially more welcoming than its predecessors. Do male colleagues talk repeatedly about sport, as they did under Johnson and do still on Radio 4’s Today, without noticing no women present are remotely interested? Do they, like Johnson’s men, sometimes make much of some “very bright” junior woman whose name they may even remember, or denounce a colleague’s misogyny, aiming to mask their own? Do senior women still apologise, like MacNamara, for sending emails? A powerful woman may, however, have cosmetic uses: after virtually every Covid press briefing had been male-led, Allegra Stratton, Johnson’s spokesperson, insisted he was a feminist.
His men had families, even partners – likely the outcome of assortative mating with the non-feral and similarly educated. In her celebrated Covid essay (the one omitting their escape to Durham), read out on Today, Cummings’s wife said he was “extremely kind”. Reading the WhatsApps you wonder: did their authors rave at home about superheroes and fighting and cunts, did they curse pensioners, slam dishwasher doors shut with a manly crash? But what happened in No 10 probably stayed in No 10; back from the front our heroes will have pictured themselves gentle giants.
At work it was all “Fightback”, “Frosty”, “that cunt”, “strong as a bull”. No girls allowed by order, D Cummings Esq. He who smelt it dealt it. The collective idiocy was spotted, early on, by the political commentator Tim Montgomerie. He deplored “Dom’s frat house, starring Caino, Roxstar, Sonic and other playground names”. Though now we have the inquiry testimony, this assessment was way too generous. Under pressure, Johnson’s administration appears quickly to have degenerated into a cross between two celebrated fraternities, The Young Ones and Lord of the Flies. Johnson, his schoolboy reading ever-present, will remember the closing scene with the naval officer.
“I should have thought that a pack of British boys – you’re all British, aren’t you? – would have been able to put up a better show than that.”
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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