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Covid inquiry: What we learnt this week [1]

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Date: 2023-11

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.

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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”.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-inquiry-this-week-boris-johnson-cummings-hancock-macnamara/

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