Boris Johnson: I should have had more women in top team during Covid
But the former PM rejected accusations of a ‘toxic’ culture and said he also needed team to be ‘argumentative’
There should have been more women at the heart of the government during the pandemic, Boris Johnson has told the Covid inquiry.
Giving evidence today, the former prime minister rejected claims he built a toxic team that people refused to be part of, but conceded the lack of diversity had an impact.
“I think that the gender balance of my team should have been better”, he said. “When I was running London, it was great, it was 50/50, and it was a very harmonious team.
“I think sometimes during the pandemic too many meetings were too male-dominated, if I'm absolutely honest with you.
“I tried sometimes to rectify it, I tried to recruit a former colleague from City Hall, but I think that that was something we should have done better.”
Johnson was responding to claims his team was “toxic” and that people were refusing to work for him because of the dysfunctionality in his team.
Despite saying meetings were too male-dominated, the former prime minister also defended the culture, saying it was “argumentative” because he “needed to have an atmosphere in which people felt able to say things that were going to be controversial at the time”.
The inquiry was shown WhatsApp messages showing concerns over the “toxic reputation” of his office.
Messages from cabinet secretary Simon Case, first shown to the inquiry in November, reveal him saying: “I’ve never seen such a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country. PM asked me today about who will replace Shinner [Tom Shinner, a No.10 official] when he goes…I was quite direct in telling him that lots of the top-drawer people I had asked had refused to come because of the toxic reputation of his office.”
Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Former health secretary Sajid Javid also told the inquiry it was a “dysfunctional” environment and that chief adviser Dominic Cummings was acting as prime minister in “all but name”.
Helen MacNamara, former deputy cabinet secretary, said Downing Street suffered from a “toxic culture” of sexism, “presenteeism” and “macho posturing,” and that member of the cabinet were a “homogenous” group of people.
Johnson agreed that there was “some force in the description of people in and around those meetings at some of those key times”.
But he pushed back that policy was impacted by this, listing some of the measures introduced around domestic violence or access to abortions.
“We were very alive to this issue,” he said.
He did concede, however, that his team “didn’t think hard enough about the impact of lockdowns on different groups” and that “sometimes it was easier for people with professional jobs to sit out the lockdown than it was for others”.
Earlier in the day, Johnson failed to list specific mistakes he had made during the pandemic and did not agree those mistakes had led to excess deaths.
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