Boris Johnson’s Downing Street was so “macho and egotistical” that women’s voices were heard for as little as 10 minutes in five hours of meetings during a key week of coronavirus policy, the Covid inquiry has heard.
Three weeks into the first lockdown, the most senior female civil servant in No 10 emailed a group of other women to say she believed “the lack of women’s voices in decision making is causing a substantive problem”.
Helen MacNamara, then the deputy cabinet secretary, said the culture was so male-dominated that female officials were routinely not invited to key meetings, were not listened to when they were, or were “not being asked for views on something they normally lead on or are knowledgable about”.
One of the recipients, Alexandra Burns, Johnson’s then private secretary, replied to say that men in No 10 often did not even bother to learn women’s names: “I’ve inexplicably been called Katie and Rosie since being down here, and sometimes just kind of vaguely gestured at.”
In her email, sent on 13 April 2020, MacNamara said she estimated that in more than five hours of discussions over the previous week during Downing Street’s daily 9.15am meeting “I think women spoke for 10-15 mins in total”.
This, she said, mainly comprised Penny Mordaunt, then the paymaster general, and Katherine Hammond, the head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, who set out the latest Covid statistics. “My concern is that at the moment the working environment/culture is too macho and egotistical. This isn’t going to get the best outcomes and it’s demoralising to work in,” MacNamara wrote.
She sent the mass email with the recipients anonymised, saying that while she had had conversations with some of the people, “I felt a bit uncomfortable about naming you – which is probably indicative of the sensitivity surrounding raising this as an issue”.
MacNamara’s email, published by the inquiry amid a huge haul of new documents at the end of the module looking into decision-making at the top of government, said the gender imbalance appeared to be a problem specific to Covid.
“I think that the lack of women’s voices in decision-making is causing a substantive problem – both because of the specific perspective and issues for women that are not being given enough attention (domestic abuse and abortion were good – bad – examples in the early weeks) and because there is insufficient humanity in decision-making,” she wrote.
Another document showed that three weeks later, MacNamara emailed Johnson’s principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, to warn about “a superhero culture” in the Cabinet Office. She also pushed back against a plan to encourage more officials to work in person, saying this risked “people basically wanging on in meetings endlessly instead of making stuff happen”.
When she gave evidence in person, MacNamara echoed these concerns about the macho environment inside Johnson’s No 10, saying in a parallel written statement that women working in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office “were experiencing very obvious sexist treatment”.
The inquiry was also shown aggressive and misogynistic messages from male officials, notably Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s then chief adviser. One showed that Cummings tried to sack MacNamara, saying No 10 was “dodging stilettos from that cunt”.
Among the other documents uploaded to the inquiry’s website was one that detailed the extent of Cummings’ influence. In his witness statement, Allan Nixon, an adviser to the health department, recalled being in a meeting in which an official described needing ministerial approval to charter a plan, to which he said Cummings said that “they didn’t need to wait and that they had authority from him”.
Another document detailed how the Treasury considered encouraging people to eat at cafes and restaurants by handing out vouchers or cards loaded with money. The second idea was dropped given the “significant risks associated with tens of millions of cards being distributed through the post as part of a highly publicised and marketed scheme, such as theft, fraud and loss”.
