Boris Johnson’s top adviser and a senior civil servant traded blows during the investigation into the pandemic last week, describing horrific degrees of government chaos. The irony was how their evidence lined up.
Covid research is expected to last three years, which is unimaginable. But one thing is already clear: there will be no more convincing or instructive evidence than that provided last Tuesday and Wednesday.
Dominic Cummings and Helen MacNamara, who gave the impression of appearing in court in the following days, will be connected in the debates via the horrific WhatsApp message Cummings sent about his former colleague to the Prime Minister, which was not easy to get out of the “handcuffed” construction if necessary: “We cannot continue to deal with this horrific collapse of the British state while avoiding the stilettos of this idiot. Even though this poisonous message made headlines, it was MacNamara, quietly overshadowing his nemesis, who had the last word.
In terms of style, they may not have been more different. Cummings is a guy in Twitter mode at 3 a. m. , immersed in a permanent outrage in front of the illuminated screen. “Slow down, Mr. Cummings,” his polite interrogator, Hugo Keith KC, continually chided him.
MacNamara, a career civil servant, was, on the other hand, modest and humane, and one of the few people who obviously decided to speak the facts to power. With this in mind, he made a devastating assessment of the situation. The “macho and heroic” tone of the government’s reaction to the pandemic, which has obviously contributed to the scale of the deaths and damage.
Watching the debates and reading the new witness statements provided through Cummings and MacNamara – statements that will be essential documents for anyone interested in the practice of long-term government – had to be transported into the first weeks and months of 2020, in which the Johnson government failed to make coherent decisions in relation to the looming crisis. It wasn’t a comfortable place.
For all their differences in temperament, it was surprising how Cummings and MacNamara agreed on the nature of the disorders that had arisen. Or they recognized that the nerve centers of the Cabinet Office and No. 10 were chaotic and slow; This knowledge was unreliable and inadequate; that there was a lack of clinical wisdom; And this planning has been surprisingly neglected.
They also shared, on other levels, a scathing assessment of the two protagonists of this existential drama: Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock were catastrophically unsuited to their roles. (This is Cummings’s theory that Johnson, whom he helped elect, was a major factor in the development of the Communist Party. )
These habitual apprehensions came to a head on the evening of Friday, March 13, 2020. That day, it became clear to both sides that the policy of delaying the peak of the pandemic until the summer had been hopelessly overcome: there were already thousands of independent outbreaks of the disease across the country, and that there is no preparedness of any kind to protect nursing homes, or to protect the vulnerable. or for the procurement of PPE, or for the broader implications of an inevitable shutdown. MacNamara had heard Hancock promise “over and over again” that detailed plans were in place for each eventuality. On Friday night, when he suddenly realized that wasn’t the case, MacNamara opened the door connecting the Cabinet Office and No. 10. “I’ve come to tell all of you that I think we’re probably screwed,” he said.
In the absence of a plan, Cummings was already drawing contingencies on a whiteboard: “Who deserves that we don’t save?”Who takes care of others who can’t do it on their own?he rolled his disjointed slate “like Theseus’ ship” from assembly to assembly as he tried to convince the Prime Minister that lockdown was now mandatory to save the NHS from collapse and prevent thousands of deaths. He was proud enough to come with a photo in his testimony. MacNamara, who had noted volumes and volumes of contingencies such as the collapse of the euro or a no-deal Brexit, knew that this did not seem at all like a strategy that could save the country from dire consequences. damage.
While they agreed on the intensity of the crisis at the time, their contrasting before-and-after analyses explained much of what happened next. MacNamara painted the picture of a high-level civil servant who, earlier in the year, “distorted” by the changing imperatives of Brexit and demoralised by the arrival of a government that had expressed contempt for all of the country’s establishments. State and summit for its recent triumph. ” We want a fashionable culture of concerted collaboration, not a superhero fight,” he wrote in a May 2020 draft report, where “everything is infected through ego. “
By February, MacNamara said, he had become increasingly involved in the tone of any discussion of the virus. There was a disconnect between the nervousness I felt and felt in my. . . network at home and see what was happening abroad, rather than accepting as true what was expressed through others when I was at work,” he recalls. Efforts to address this dissonance at meetings have been dismissed. Discussions focused solely on “revolutionary” knowledge and plans, rather than vulnerable families and children. “Thinking about how other people will be affected and making plans to minimize harm is a chronically underestimated probability in the machinery of government,” he wrote in his statement. The harsh word that was the name of Archbishop James Jones’ report on the Hillsborough tragedy kept swirling around in his head: “The condescending disposition of irresponsible power. “
As the crisis deepened, she witnessed a shrinking organization of men, occasionally led by Cummings, making decisions on behalf of all of us. Women have become “invisible overnight” in decision-making, she writes in her testimony. phone calls or sitting in the back of the room. According to her, one of the consequences is that a whole diversity of genuine affections has not been taken into account. She bought copies of Caroline Criado Pérez’s e-book Invisible Women and distributed them.
At the heart of it all was the philosophy, he notes, that “it was less difficult to think about building new things than it was to try to make what already existed work. “Number 10’s “government mentality” was that “everything had to be” While Cummings fantasized about recreating DARPA, the company guilty of being the first generation of the U. S. military, MacNamara was trying to interest anyone who paid attention to the Public Health Act of 1875. , which bureaucracies the foundations of the national fitness care structures that are still in place: “The fact that there is already a nationwide network of public fitness administrators, with broad powers, who had not even registered,” he points out.
Evidence of this research was widely available in the research room the day before. Cummings began his testimony by first rejecting all democratic establishments in the country. The closet was “largely irrelevant,” “not a position for serious discussion,” and “another factor to be addressed”; the Cabinet Office was “the site of a bomb” and “a fire in a dumpster. “Local government, devolved administrations, Public Health England and NHS hierarchies hardly deserved to be discussed in his testimony, as uncompromising obstacles to his vision of moving fast and breaking things. .
“Is there anything in the machinery of government in which you don’t find fault?” the lawyer asked. He replied, without irony, that he had once had a clever encounter with special forces.
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This active hostility towards the existing state apparatus reflected the attitude of the prime minister. In late February, as the rest of the world watched the spread of the disease outside of China, Johnson was at his country residence, looking to come up with a solution. unreadable book about Shakespeare and finalize the divorce settlement with his wife (who had spent the last few years writing an unreadable book about Shakespeare). He underwent a series of surgeries for cervical cancer) so he could announce his girlfriend’s pregnancy. , there was consternation that he had not attended any of the Cobra meetings to assess the risk of Covid. “Many argue that if he had left, the arrangements would have been better,” Cummings said. “I think it’s just the opposite. “
In this damning trial, Cummings noted that when he tried to advise Johnson to warn others who were opposed to shaking hands, in March, he “promptly appeared on television and explained how he shook hands with everyone in the hospital”; The day before the whiteboard plan was created, Cummings reports, Johnson was asked about a story about Dilyn the dog in the Times.
At this time, MacNamara’s task was to prepare memoranda for the prime minister for cabinet meetings; It was, in standard practice, the way in which the collective wisdom of public service could be applied to government priorities. Earlier in the year, MacNamara consciously included “warnings about the uncertainty of the outlook” about Covid. However, those tonal imperatives were not even heeded: “he rarely [even] referred to the report. “
Instead of those existing governance formulas, MacNamara observes in his witness statement, there was a preference [on Cummings’] part to create a project formula at NASA. “I appreciate it,” he says dryly, “it would have been better. . . . . . to have ministers whom [Johnson] and his team trusted to move forward. . . and to make the most of the unique and vital qualities of public service that she can bring when she is allowed to be as productive as possible.
Obviously, Johnson wasn’t interested in such an idea. The tribal impulse that had brought him to all the dissenting voices in the parliamentary Conservative Party spread, under Cummings’s influence, to the civil service. Checks and balances on enforceability were obstacles that had to be overcome. be eliminated. MacNamara’s explanation of the cases that led to Cummings’ vicious WhatsApp message shed light on this broader culture. The “styluses” to which Cummings referred were two: first, MacNamara’s refusal to conform to the imposition of David Frost, a divisive political figure, in the politically impartial and highly sensitive role of national security adviser; and, secondly, Cummings’ insistence on appearing before an employment tribunal to account for his behaviour towards Sonia Khan, a young political adviser whom he had sacked and escorted out of Downing Street via a police officer.
MacNamara, who resigned later that year, said the revelation of Cummings’ message was provocative on two levels: first, “that it was disappointing to me that the prime minister did not retract this violent and misogynistic language” and, second, that it “revealed precisely an attitude towards public service. “
There is no doubt that MacNamara and Cummings’ testimony comprises many lectures on how this service can be much more effective and accountable in times of serious crisis, but the overarching message from last week’s hearings was: Don’t elect politicians who are far more concerned with their own progress than with the well-being of their citizens.
MacNamara’s final word on the subject, witnessed through some of the Covid-afflicted families in the research room, may simply be an epitaph to this utterly disastrous period: “It is a far cry from what is right or proper or decent or what the country deserves. »