![Helen MacNamara (pictured) and Gray are both experienced and committed to the civil service, each a woman who can draw on the deep loyalty of admiring former colleagues. (Photo by UK Covid-19 Inquiry / AFP)](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_178354127.jpg?crop=0px%2C103px%2C2495px%2C1411px&resize=640%2C360)
In December of last year, former civil servant Jill Rutter published a report on the relationship between civil servants and ministers. Despite the popular perception of senior civil servants as institutionalised lifers, Rutter is experienced both in the private and public sectors, including a five-year stint at BP. Now a senior research fellow at think tank UK in a Changing Europe, she has become a widely respected expert on our systems of government.
Her report, published as part of a joint constitutional review by the Institute for Government and Bennett Institute for Public Policy, is well worth reading in full. The title gives a flavour: “Relationship Breakdown“.
The press release for it sums up the landscape thus: “Brexit, Covid and Boris Johnson have made existing tensions in relations between civil servants and ministers unsustainable.” (The breakdown in relations between Priti Patel and Philip Rutnam, a former Home Office permanent secretary who accepted a settlement with the Government after suing for constructive dismissal, also did major damage.)
Rutter argues that it is time for an urgent reset. Her proposed solution advocates not that we put less distance between ministers and civil servants, but that we impose more, putting the Civil Service on a statutory basis with a formal duty to uphold the public interest and with permanent secretaries more firmly enabled to uphold ministerial propriety.
For years, bashing the Civil Service has been a popular pastime for right-leaning public figures, who perceive its people as leftist, obstructive of innovation and prone to groupthink. Dominic Cummings was reported to have promised a “hard rain” to fall on the Cabinet Office after his arrival as Boris Johnson’s chief adsviser; his allies denied the now-notorious phrase had been used, but the language was characteristic of Cummings’s much-publicised antagonism towards the Civil Service establishment. As the editor of Civil Service World told this newspaper in May: “Trust is now at an all-time low on both sides.” And if you hadn’t noticed the bad blood, this week’s events at the Covid inquiry put the matter beyond all doubt.
The testimony of Helen MacNamara, former second permanent secretary to the Cabinet Office, stole the headlines on Wednesday. There has been much focus on her evidence that Johnson and Cummings oversaw a culture of “sexism” and “macho posturing” that led to the “exclusion of a female perspective” and ignorance about issues affecting childcare, domestic violence and the provision of PPE built for female bodies.
These are not new themes. Feminist writers, including myself, have raised concerns throughout the Johnson years about a male culture led by Cummings and his ally Lee Cain, but were dismissed as simply carrying a brief for Johnson’s wife Carrie.
There will be plenty of voices eager again to dismiss these accusations of male myopia as special pleading. But the evidence is on MacNamara’s side. An email, published alongside her witness statement, shows that she felt forced to explain to the NHS England chief Simon Stevens that “most PPE isn’t designed for female bodies and yet the overwhelming majority of people who need PPE are women.”
What’s remarkable is that MacNamara felt the need to highlight this to an NHS chief. There had already been considerable publicity following the impact of Caroline Criado-Perez’s ground-breaking book, Invisible Women, which addresses this issue in one chapter. (MacNamara says in her written witness statement that she bought several copies.) A 2016 report by trade unions showed that only five per cent of women working in the emergency services had never found their work hampered by having the wrong PPE.
There is no excuse for an NHS chief not to have known the scale of the problem. The charitable perspective is that Stevens did, and that MacNamara was worrying unnecessarily. But we already know that the government failed to secure sufficient PPE for women – and that it similarly failed to secure PPE designed to fit black staff, who then endured higher mortality rates on the front line.
Speak to people in Westminster and it has become crystal clear that the men around Johnson had simply not examined the implications of the rules they’d signed off for childcare – just as MacNamara claims. In a column last year, I told readers about the babysitter who had to persuade her boss, a senior member of the Johnson government, that the rules he’d signed off meant she couldn’t come into work – I promised my sources I wouldn’t name the employer and thus risk their own anonymity, but let’s just say he’s had a lot to say about other people’s mistakes over Covid recently.
But as readers will have noticed, not all of MacNamara’s targets were government appointees, or ministers. Stevens is a long-term civil servant advising on public health, is an independent peer, and has a youthful past in the Labour Party. Read her full statement, and you’ll also find a pop at her Civil Service predecessor Sue Gray.
![Former top civil servant and partygate investigator Sue Gray in her office in the Houses of Parliament, London, on her first day in her new role as the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer's chief of staff. Picture date: Monday September 4, 2023. PA Photo. See PA story POLITICS Labour. Photo credit should read: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_170121731.jpg?w=760)
Gray’s report into the Partygate scandal led to MacNamara herself receiving a fine for an event at which she set up a karaoke machine “in an empty room, for people to use (not together…)”, as she insists. Footnote 123, on page 77, sticks in the knife: “The Cabinet Office report has been found subsequently to be inaccurate in some details … e.g. no one vomited.” This is the Civil Service equivalent of pistols at dawn.
MacNamara’s beef with Gray is symptomatic of a broader war – not between civil servants and ministers, but between civil servants themselves about what the future looks like. Gray was widely criticised by her former colleagues when she seemingly abandoned a lifelong commitment to impartiality to quit and join the office of Keir Starmer. Lest there be any misapprehension – I have not spoken to Gray about this story in any way, communicated with her, or been given any brief.
But it is widely understood in Westminster that her relationship with Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, had completely broken down, not least because of Case’s closeness to his political masters, and her determination to maintain the independence of her report into their misdoings. Her supporters point out that this Tory government has itself appointed advisers from the ranks of civil servants formly sworn to impartiality, including the rambunctious David Frost.
MacNamara and Gray are both experienced and committed to the Civil Service, each a woman who can draw on the deep loyalty of admiring former colleagues. (One senior civil servant described the karaoke headlines about MacNamara as “incredibly unfair to a person of huge integrity and thoughtfulness”.)
Against the fraught atmosphere of an increasingly politicised Civil Service, they at one point represented two different ways of responding to a corrupted system: leave quietly (MacNamara departed in 2021 for the Premier League), or accept that the old norms are irretrievably broken, and find new allies to build something better.
Whatever their own differences, a healthier and happier Civil Service would have kept them both.