Boris Johnson’s No 10 was toxic, sexist and devoid of humanity, says former top civil servant

Boris Johnson oversaw a “toxic” culture of sexism and complacency at No 10 during the Covid crisis, according to scathing evidence given by a former top civil servant to the public inquiry.

Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary, said she could not recall “one day” on which Covid rules were followed in No 10 or the Cabinet Office – claiming that “hundreds” of officials and ministers broke the guidelines.

She also criticised an “absence of humanity” in No 10 and revealed that officials there were “laughing at the Italians” who were overwhelmed in the early stages of the crisis – with Mr Johnson expressing a breezy confidence that the UK would sail through the pandemic.

The former top civil servant also said Mr Johnson did nothing to stop ex-No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings’s misogynistic behaviour after it emerged that Mr Cummings had labelled her “that c***” and said he would “handcuff her and escort her” from Downing Street.

It came as:

Ms MacNamara said that on 13 March, a little over a week before the first lockdown, she warned Mr Cummings and others in Mr Johnson’s office that the country was “absolutely f***ed” and “heading for a disaster” in which thousands of people would die.

She said her earlier warnings in January and February did not register with the PM, and that in early Covid meetings, Mr Johnson was “very confident that the UK would sail through”.

The former top official said there had been a “jovial tone” and that “sitting there and saying it was great and sort of laughing at the Italians was just ... it felt how it sounds”.

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Referring to the culture of rule-breaking within the government, Ms MacNamara said: “Actually, I would find it hard to pick one day when the regulations were followed properly inside that building,” referring to both No 10 and the Cabinet Office.

The former top civil servant also told the inquiry: “I’m certain that there are hundreds of civil servants, and potentially ministers, who in retrospect think they were the wrong side of that line.”

In written evidence, Ms MacNamara said that there was “very obvious sexist treatment” that saw women overlooked and undermined in both No 10 and the Cabinet Office. “The dominant culture was macho and heroic,” she wrote.

She said there was a “toxic culture” when asked about Mr Cummings’s August 2020 messages referring to her, which read: “We cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown ... while dodging stilettos from that c***.”

“It’s horrible to read,” she responded. “But it’s both surprising and not surprising to me.” She said she was disappointed that Mr Johnson did not do more to stop such “violent and misogynistic language”.

Ms MacNamara also suggested that a lack of diversity among top officials in Mr Johnson’s government had led to the deaths of women from domestic violence. She cited confusion about whether women could access abortion during the lockdown, closing fertility treatment services, and failing to make provisions for victims of domestic abuse.

Asked if he had cleared out the “misogyny” at No 10, Mr Sunak said on Wednesday: “My Downing Street is a place where I think people are not just happy to work … that’s very much the culture that I want to create here. And I believe we have done.”

In the bombshell new written evidence from Mr Cummings that emerged on Wednesday, the former No 10 strategist claimed that Mr Johnson had circulated a YouTube video – since taken down – of a man blowing a special hairdryer up his nose.

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Describing it as a “low point”, Mr Cummings said the then PM asked the government’s chief scientific adviser and chief medical officer what they thought of the idea – which was dismissed as having no foundation.

Mr Johnson also told Mr Cummings in the autumn of 2020 that he wanted him to “dead cat” Covid – find another big story to distract the public – because he was “sick” of the issue. The adviser told the PM that this would not work.

Mr Cummings said Mr Johnson had to be stopped from going to see the Queen on 18 March – five days before the first lockdown. “I was desperate, and said something like, ‘If you’ve got Covid and you kill the Queen, you’re finished.’”

Mr Cummings claimed that Carrie Johnson had exacerbated Mr Johnson’s indecisiveness. But he also said that Mr Johnson himself had sometimes blamed her unfairly for U-turns that were “NOT her fault”.

He also repeated a suggestion that Mr Johnson was working on a book about William Shakespeare during a two-week holiday in February 2020 rather than focusing on the pandemic.

In a further sign of the farcical situation in Downing Street, Ms MacNamara revealed that it took seven months to get a hand sanitiser station installed by the door between No 10 and the Cabinet Office. She condemned Mr Johnson’s “following the science” mantra, since many at No 10 didn’t understand what the science was.

The ex-official also said that the UK was already on the back foot when Covid hit, because of Brexit. She criticised the “monomaniacal” way Mr Johnson’s team focused on Brexit, and then the 2019 election, at the expense of planning.

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She was also scathing about the then health secretary Matt Hancock’s performance, after Mr Cummings referred to him as a liar. Backing up the claims, the former deputy cabinet secretary said she had lost confidence that “what he [Mr Hancock] said was happening was actually happening” in the NHS.

Ms MacNamara suggested that Mr Hancock had displayed “nuclear levels” of overconfidence. She recalled a “jarring” episode in which the health secretary adopted a cricket batsman’s pose – an attempt to suggest that he would simply “knock away” questions about big Covid issues.

The former civil servant, who now works for the Premier League, made headlines when it emerged that she had provided a karaoke machine for a lockdown event in No 10 in June 2020 and was later fined for her part in the leaving do, which she called an “error of judgement”.

She told the inquiry she “definitely wasn’t partying in No 10” – but conceded that there should have been an admission that rules were broken, something Mr Johnson denied.

“My profound regret is for the damage that’s been caused to so many people because of it, as well as just the mortifying experience of seeing what that looks like and how rightly offended everybody is in retrospect,” said Ms MacNamara.

Meanwhile, Dr David Halpern – the chief executive of the Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the “nudge unit” – told the inquiry that Mr Cummings’s infamous Barnard Castle trip was “atrocious”. He said: “It blows a hole in public confidence if you break the rules and then try to wriggle out of it.”

Dr Halpern said it was a “mistake” to have used the term “herd immunity” in the early stages of the pandemic. He revealed that the No10 communications director at the time, Jack Doyle, had given him the “hairdryer treatment” for using the term “cocooning” in reference to shielding older people.