Reruns of the black political comedy The Thick of It have introduced a new generation to the delights of Armando Iannucci’s unsparing treatment of Whitehall’s turf wars. And the dark star is Malcom Tucker as the potty-mouthed prince of bullying invective.
Satire often turns out to be a warm-up for reality these days and in Dominic Cummings, one-time chief advisor to Boris Johnson, we have a real-life version of Peter Capaldi’s relentless, negatively charged Svengali. We discover via the WhatsApp deluge on display in the Covid inquiry now underway Cummings’s Tucker-esque talent for abusing colleagues – from ministers to civil servants – described variously as the c-word, “f–k pigs” and more ornate oaths.
Much of this style is baked into the culture of bringing disruptors into the heart of government. Johnson’s original aim in adopting the architect of the successful Vote Leave campaign in 2016 was to have an ally in his battle against the stodge of bureaucracy. The breath of fresh air, however, turned into an unruly gust which, inter alia, knifed the man who appointed him. Justice is sometimes seen to be done.
Crucial to understanding the sweary communications of Cummings is that he has always understood himself to be an outsider, speaking unpalatable truth to power. But the torrent of abuse, most notably when he threatened to march Helen MacNamara, the deputy cabinet secretary with whom he had several run-ins during the pandemic, out of Westminster, includes language used with extreme prejudice, not just an outburst of colour.
Cummings messaged Johnson in 2020 to say that he was tired of facing “stilettos from that c–t” and wanted to “personally handcuff her and escort her from the building”.
Such words can have traits of misogyny, whether the speaker is aware of it or not.
Cummings’s cursing, which he concedes was “deplorable”, is, to his mind at least, just the way he communicated high feelings towards men and women – and many of the words he used are indeed bandied around now regardless of sex.
Still, even prolific office swearers would usually think twice about applying the “c-word” to a woman – for the obvious reason that it is Anglo Saxon for a part of the female anatomy. The “stiletto” line probably refers more to a dagger than a high heel. But the truth is that Cummings had a vendetta with a senior official and spoke in a denigrating fashion about her multiple times.
How could she – or her staff – possibly feel comfortable in that milieu?
The paradox here is that Cummings (and this really is the shock news of the story) is in person mainly softly spoken and usually courteous. He is also prone to needling and provoking – a habit which seems to have become a default setting and eclipses a keen political intelligence.
So my guess here is not that he is a rampant misogynist all of the time – I have had testy encounters with him for about three decades, but I never felt him to be anti-women. But there is a phenomenon of men who are charming or convivial in personal or social life, who bring a bullish tone to office communications. It is not only a male trait, but when it is mixed with the Malcom Tucker memorial vibe, the net effect is demeaning.
The theme of having two high profile women marched off the premises (Cummings also feuded with one of Sajid Javid’s advisers, Sonia Khan, who subsequently received compensation for unfair dismissal), does not exactly support the version of events that, apart from a few bouts of swearing, everything was fine for the women in and around Downing Street.
An “orgy of narcissism” is what Johnson despairingly called the chaos and infighting raging around him in the pandemic. But that starts at the top. Women do not need to be treated with kid gloves in the workplace. But neither should they expect office rows to be the subject of the worst kind of laddish exchanges. You cannot claim to be scrupulously fair in treatment of the sexes – and then convey images of them being marched out (in a Trumpian default mode) in handcuffs. Misogyny may be too sweeping a term for this sort of behaviour. Other words are available. But all of them can be translated as “unacceptable”.
Anne McElvoy hosts the POWER PLAY podcast for POLITICO
