Covid inquiry: What we learnt this week (it wasn't all foul-mouthed rants)

The Covid inquiry has been everywhere this week – largely thanks to the bickering and foul-mouthed rants of the privileged white men at the heart of government when the pandemic hit.

And sure, Matt Hancock being called a “c**t” is always entertaining, but given this is a public inquiry about a pandemic that’s killed over 230,000 people in the UK, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s all a bit trivial.

Helen MacNamara’s evidence served as an important reminder that that’s not the case.

On Wednesday, the former deputy cabinet secretary laid out exactly why the “toxic culture” of sexism and “macho posturing” in Boris Johnson’s team was so damaging. So too was the “narrow perspective” they shared. According to MacNamara, key figures in Whitehall presided over an environment in which junior women were “talked over or ignored”. And yet, despite this “breezy confidence”, there was never any plan on how Number 10 would actually respond to Covid.

A ‘Coronavirus: Action Plan’ published on 3 March was described as an “extraordinary document in retrospect” in MacNamara’s written evidence, because “so many of the assertions about how well prepared we were would turn out to be wrong only weeks later”.

“At that stage I had no idea that we did not in fact have plans for what was coming and much of what was in the document had not been adequately tested or just was not true for the circumstances we were in,” she said.

MacNamara said she only realised the scale of the problem in early March when she began to ask to see the plans – “only to eventually be told that no one had anything that was recognisable as a plan encompassing the sorts of measures that would need to be implemented as the pandemic worsened”. She said Hancock – who has been accused of lying repeatedly during this period– “told us time and time again plans were in place”.

As Matt Fowler of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice reminds us in his editorial, the “orgy of narcissism” – as Johnson put it himself – had devastating consequences.

Even a plan that did definitely exist, Boris Johnson’s February 2021 ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown, was “published without any Cabinet collective agreement process” and “was probably read by fewer than 30 people before it was published as the government’s plan”, according to MacNamara.

MacNamara also said the lack of diversity at the heart of Number 10 led to huge blind spots when it came to deciding on restrictions. The “exclusion of a female perspective”, she said, led to “significant negative consequences” on vital issues such as domestic abuse, carers, single parents, childcare, pregnancy and childbirth. Instead, there was “a disproportionate amount of attention given to more male pursuits… (football, hunting, shooting and fishing).”

Her written evidence went further, describing how Covid’s impact on women, poorer people and minority ethnic communities “was treated as if these were naturally occurring phenomena rather than the consequences of deliberate choices (albeit often historic)”.

“I remember trying to make the point about the ethnic diversity of people involved in advising on and making decisions only to get a surprised response pointing out the involvement of the then chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary neither of whom were white,” MacNamara recalled.

“It was very difficult to bridge over that kind of gap in understanding. The lived experience of those involved in making decisions was miles away from most people in the UK.”

She then gave another example. “I found myself explaining that even people who were lucky enough to have a back garden might not have separate back gate or outside loo – so it would be important to be clear whether it was ok to go through the house,” she said.

Lee Cain, Johnson’s former communications chief, also touched on the lack of diversity within Johnson's senior team “in gender, in socioeconomic and in ethnic minority”.

“If you lack that diversity within a team you create problems in decision-making, policy development and culture,” he said, before going on to explain that he had to warn against scrapping free school meals.

Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, also told the inquiry it wasn’t until after Covid’s first wave that the disproportionate impact of the virus on people from Black and minority ethnic communities became a consideration.

We also heard, again from Vallance’s evidence, that in September 2020 then chancellor Rishi Sunak was “blocking all notion of paying to get people to isolate, despite all the evidence that this will be needed”.

And other clashes between scientists and the politicians were revealed this week. MacNamara claimed that despite “reasonable” calls for a ‘fire-break’ lockdown in autumn 2020, “the politics wouldn’t allow for it”, and she also described disputes within the cabinet about how much power police should be given to enforce restrictions.

One of the most explosive details to come out was the note from Patrick Vallance’s diary in December 2020 claiming Johnson said that a lot of his party “thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them”. Johnson, it turns out, also took a “two-week holiday” in the middle of February 2020, during which time he received no correspondence from his team about Covid. It’s probably worth pointing out here that MacNamara claimed Johnson and his team had been “laughing at the Italians” for locking down in March.

And there were plenty of other significant details that didn’t get much coverage. Yesterday, a senior civil servant at the Department of Health told the inquiry that in hindsight, the UK locked down “at least a week too late”. This followed Cummings saying in his own evidence that as late as 23 March, the week of the first lockdown, documents coming out of COBRA, the Cabinet Office and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat showed the crisis peaking at the end of May and beginning of June, whereas “better data” directly from the NHS was showing the crisis was “almost upon us”.

“The fact that that was still on graphs in the week of the 26th is genuinely astonishing in retrospect, because of course it's completely false,” he said.

MacNamara’s written evidence also described the enthusiasm around the Nightingale hospitals, which went on to be barely used. She wrote: “In retrospect the conversations were all about the buildings and the beds and not the people that would be needed to staff them.”

This all followed the first bombshell of the inquiry on Monday morning, when we learnt that top Johnson aide Martin Reynolds changed the settings on a senior government WhatsApp group to delete messages automatically, while the inquiry was being organised.

Johnson and Hancock will have the chance to put their side across later this month, as will Sunak. Next week, former cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill and former special adviser Ben Warner are set to appear. So too are Priti Patel and the former chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council Martin Hewitt.

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