Helen MacNamara’s quietly devastating evidence to the Covid inquiry reminded me how desperately we need more women channelling their anger into politics
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.
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Once heard, it is trembling; It plays in my head every time I watch the news. I learned that he was whispering it to me the wrong way (angry man/frustrated woman) while looking at the survey, but either thing works. Frustrated/angry men stood out or sent vituperations. WhatsApps, while frustrated/angry women were watched, marginalized and ignored. The result?” The exclusion of a feminine attitude has had significant negative consequences,” as MacNamara puts it in the measured language of a former public servant. It wasn’t true, other people leading and the Belgian dancers are right: we desperately want more women to channel their anger into politics. The challenge is that when you see those unedifying shenanigans, you demonstrate and listen to what MacNamara and his colleagues have been forced to deal with. , the prospect is totally unattractive.