Even Helen MacNamara, one of the most powerful women in Whitehall, was brushed aside when she raised concerns
Sorry to bother you. Would you mind terribly? No worries if not!
Of course, it’s not just women who sprinkle their emails with deleted words like this, but let’s just say the scales are tipping in that direction. It’s women who are conditioned to act great and not to help people; to cajole, push, and calm down instead of barking orders or provoking fights. Even energetic professionalism is considered icy on a woman’s part, so we’re going to upload a softening exclamation point just in case.
The story doesn’t say whether Boris Johnson also regretted upsetting everyone when he allegedly asked scientists, at the height of the pandemic, if it was true that you could kill Covid-19 simply by blowing your nose with a hairdryer, as he had observed on YouTube. But we do know that Helen MacNamara, then Deputy Cabinet Secretary and one of the most influential women in Whitehall, felt compelled to start by saying, “Just when you thought you were out of the woods, thanks to annoying emails from me. . . “by messaging colleagues about explicit considerations that oversized PPE not designed for women’s bodies could endanger frontline staff.
Her argument was far from trivial (the doctors worried that oversized gloves and an open mask would infect them with a deadly virus), yet she was emailing other overworked people around midnight, which would possibly lead to an apologetic tone and encouragement to approve the emojis. even though he found it very clever in Downing Street, judging by Dominic Cummings’ furious ravings on WhatsApp about “dodging that cat’s stilettos”. (The two men had clashed, according to MacNamara, over attempts to give Brexit negotiator a task, David Frost even deemed inappropriate, and over a wrongful termination case brought through a former aide whom Cummings had fired through police. )
It is in this context that MacNamara said in research this week that the issues affecting women during the pandemic are simply not being taken seriously enough by the government. She described women experts being ignored, discussed, and disrespected to the point that they couldn’t do their jobs. , with profound consequences for millions of other women who are counting on the government to do the right thing on everything from school closures to access abortion during lockdown to assisting those experiencing domestic violence trapped in their homes with their abusers.
“It’s very difficult to draw conclusions other than the fact that women have died because of this,” she said in an email describing the aftermath. As MacNamara, a mother of four, described how women felt they could not enjoy their daily lives at assemblies, an echo was heard from former Downing Street doctor Lee Cain, who in the past had described his frustration at Johnson’s rejection of calls for more flexible education. Cain learned that he was the only one in an assembly of 20 others who had grown deficient enough to be able to attend.
Talk of diversity in the most sensible and poisonous “painting place culture” may sound like ridiculous HR talk. But in times of crisis, the way decision-makers paint in combination and what they perceive about ordinary life has life-and-death implications. That’s why this week’s revelations go far beyond a few insulting WhatsApp messages and a dispute over whether Cummings was a misogynist. When the government’s decision-making process was affected, so did thousands of vulnerable people.
For what it’s worth, when claims that Cummings had a “woman problem” first surfaced years ago, I asked around some of his ex-colleagues and was told it was more of a people problem: specifically, a tendency to regard almost everyone as a moron. His defence now that he was even ruder about men rings true – he didn’t just try to fire MacNamara but also the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, and would probably have ousted Johnson if he could – yet spectacularly misses the point.
It’s not just complaints, it’s what MacNamara called a “macho and heroic” culture of nuclear overconfidence in government, characterised by people like Hancock, who, when asked how he dealt with the pressure, struck a cricket pose and said, “They throw them at me; I’m tearing them down” — and through Johnson’s positive but unsubstantiated confidence that everything would work brilliantly one way or another.
People who cared and apologized were not adequate. It was hard to be the one to say no, said MacNamara, who felt slighted when she warned the Prime Minister’s Office at the start of the pandemic: “We’re surely screwed. “, Sonia Khan, the Treasury assistant who was abruptly sacked by Cummings in 2019, later described to the BBC an intimidating painting culture in which men rallied around the game and women found themselves excluded, as in a flashback to the 2000s.
Watching them testify, one can understand why Cummings and MacNamara might have attacked each other: she calmly restrained herself, he scrolling through Twitter late at night after starting to fight with reporters. But while a strong leader may have tapped into the more productive of both, as Cummings presented valuable insights at the start of the pandemic, during the chaos, this one brought out the worst. MacNamara ended up feeling embarrassed to attend a closed-door party at her workplace, while Cummings’ most serious arguments in the investigation into the government’s handling of clinical knowledge disappeared in a typhoon of swearing.
Surely it is Boris Johnson who deserves to start by apologising when, in spite of everything, he comes forward before this inquiry – a mea culpa not only for all the death and suffering, but also for creating this dystopian workplace zoo, in which even the other people may simply not do what the country needed. Except that lamenting, in this case, is far from enough.