Last week the Covid inquiry heard evidence from Dominic Cummings, the self-proclaimed genius behind the Vote Leave campaign who became a powerful figure in Boris Johnson’s administration, and from Helen McNamara, the deputy chief civil servant (and highest-ranking woman) in the Cabinet Office. They had worked together during the early phase of the pandemic, but to say they did not get on would be an understatement. In one of the WhatsApp messages which were apparently the government’s preferred mode of internal communication, Cummings ranted:
…if I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit…I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don’t care how it’s done but that woman must be out of our hair—we cannot keep dealing with this horrific meltdown of the British state while dodging stilettos from that cunt.
At the inquiry McNamara hit back with a comprehensive critique of the macho, misogynist culture Cummings and others had presided over. In addition to making the Cabinet Office a toxic workplace for female employees, this had affected, she said, the government’s handling of the crisis in ways that were directly damaging to millions of women.
The lawyer for the inquiry raised the issue of Cummings’s language, asking him if he felt he had expressed himself too “trenchantly”. He replied that while he accepted some of his language had been “deplorable”, the direness of the situation had justified strong words. As for misogyny, he pointed out that he was an equal-opportunity cunt-user—he had called Matt Hancock a cunt, for example—and had been, if anything, even ruder about the male colleagues he referred to as “fuckpigs” and “morons”.
It did not surprise me that this defence attracted no support from feminists. But I was more surprised to see quite a few feminists criticizing the language used by Helen McNamara. Not for being aggressive or obscene, but for the opposite sin of being too “girly”.
Exhibit A was an email she had sent to Simon Stevens, the boss of NHS England, about one of the issues affecting women which she felt was being ignored. Here it is in full:
Hi Simon and Mary.
Just when you thought you were out of the woods on annoying emails from me… Has the PPE conversation picked up the fact that most PPE isn’t designed for female bodies and the overwhelming majority of people who need PPE are female? (77% of NHS staff are female, 89% of nurses and 84% of careworkers.) There has been quite a bit of commentary on this. To state the bleeding obvious women’s bodies are different and particularly face shape with masks. If you need more on this let me know! But would reassuring [sic] to know that it is being taken into account in this new supply.
I don’t know who to annoy with this so chose you. But by all means tell me where to direct my questioning.
👊 (that’s a fist bump not a punch)
H
This was held up as a classic example of our old friend the “female email”—in one commenter’s words, “full of apologies…full of deference…full of self-deprecation and emojis”. Caitlin Moran reposted this comment, adding that “the first advice I gave my daughter, when she started working, was to delete the first and last lines of her emails. Why? Because the first and last lines are where you apologize for sending the email. No emails I get from men start or end like that”.
In fairness to these commenters I should say that their intention clearly wasn’t to attack McNamara personally: rather they were using her email as an illustration of the more general argument that women’s experiences of sexism lead even high-status professionals in senior positions to speak and write in ways which are unnecessarily apologetic and deferential. These so-called “female verbal tics”, like starting every email with an apology for bothering the recipient, undermine women’s authority and cause others to perceive them as lightweights. As regular readers will know, however, this popular view is not one I share. And in this case I think the criticism of McNamara is based on a somewhat superficial analysis of the email itself.
Is her email, in fact, “full of apologies…deference…self-deprecation and emojis”? The most obvious evidence for that reading is the fact that McNamara, demonstrating Caitlin Moran’s point, both opens and closes her message by describing it, and/or herself, as “annoying”. She also follows the emoji [note: singular, not plural—the email isn’t “full of emoji”] with a parenthetical “that’s a fist-bump not a punch”, an unnecessary explanation which suggests she feels the need to reassure her correspondents that her message isn’t meant to be hostile. It’s not entirely unreasonable to read this as apologetic and self-deprecating (“sorry to be annoying, please be assured that I’m not attacking you”), but in fact I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.
First of all, it’s simplistic to analyse this message in isolation, because it clearly has a back-story. We can infer from the first line (“just when you thought you were out of the woods…”) that this is not the first time McNamara has emailed Simon Stevens to voice her concerns. The reference to “annoying messages [plural] from me” suggests she has done so on at least two, and possibly several, previous occasions. By doing it again, she’s making clear (a) that she doesn’t feel she has had a satisfactory response, and (b) that she is not prepared to let the matter drop. In that context, her acknowledgment that Stevens may find her persistence annoying looks less like kneejerk girly self-effacement and more like a realistic assessment of the situation. She is telling him she knows her message may be unwelcome, but since she’s chosen to send it anyway, this comes across less as a sincere apology for bothering him than as a diplomatic figleaf—arguably the effect is more “sorry not sorry” than “pardon me for taking up your time”.
Second, it’s not true that the email is “full of” the female-email features mentioned in the comments I quoted earlier. I’ve already noted that there’s only one emoji in it, but more to the point, the central part of the message is not at all deferential or self-deprecating. McNamara outlines her concern directly and confidently: far from expressing self-doubt, she puts on an overt display—you might even say, an ostentatious one—of her knowledge about the subject she is raising. Since Stevens is presumably equally familiar with some of the facts she draws to his attention (like the percentage of women in his own workforce), this might appear more patronizing than deferential. If she were a man and he a woman, we might even be tempted to accuse her of mansplaining.
There’s a sign she may have recognized this as a problem in her use of the jocular phrase “to state the bleeding obvious” (or in other words, “I know I’m telling you things you already know”). When you say something that on the face of things doesn’t need saying because the person you’re addressing already knows it, that will often suggest to them that you’re trying to communicate something else which you don’t want to say explicitly: in this case, perhaps, something like “since you already know all this, you should surely be doing something about it”. That may, indeed, be McNamara’s intention, but the jocularity of “to state the bleeding obvious” softens that rather accusatory message. By switching to a more informal, conversational register she can counter the impression that she’s lecturing him, and put the exchange on a more equal, collegial footing.
To me, in fact, the most striking thing about this email is its informal and not infrequently jokey tone. The jokiness is intermittent rather than sustained throughout, but it’s still striking because of what’s being discussed and in what circumstances. At a moment when the government and the NHS were in crisis mode, making decisions that were literally matters of life and death, you might expect more gravity and less levity. Granted, there is such a thing as “gallows humour”, deployed to help people get through stressful and upsetting experiences, and humour also functions in most workplaces as a bonding device. But perhaps there’s another reason why McNamara seems to have been striving for a certain lightness of tone. The evidence considered by the inquiry last week suggests that interactions among the people who were managing the crisis were characterized by a remarkable lack of seriousness. At the weekend the columnist Catherine Bennett compared Downing Street during the Johnson/Cummings era to a “frat house”, but arguably its culture owed more to the values of a specifically British institution: the elite boys’ public school.
I have written before about Boris Johnson’s use of a “naughty schoolboy” persona, constructed in part by his use of puerile playground insults like “big girl’s blouse” and “girly swot”, and how that was persona was taken up, or pandered to, by the media in a way that worked to his advantage. Each new display of his incompetence, laziness or dishonesty became just another “scrape” that “Boris” had got himself into, something to laugh about in the same way you’d laugh at the madcap exploits of a fictional fourth-former.
We already knew before the inquiry started that his early response to Covid had been determinedly unserious—first dismissing the threat as exaggerated (not least by those always over-excitable Italian chappies), then hyperbolically declaring he didn’t care if the bodies piled up in their thousands. Amid concern that the NHS had too few ventilators to treat everyone who was going to need one, he reportedly suggested that an initiative to get more British companies involved in manufacturing them could be called “Operation Last Gasp”. Even when a joke was as tasteless as that one, he apparently saw no reason not to make it.
But the inquiry has revealed that this puerility extended far beyond Johnson. It shows up even in such minor details as the nicknames the men used for each other in their endless WhatsApp messages. Names like “Caino” (Lee Cain) and “Frosty” (David Frost) may be inoffensive by comparison with “fuckpig” and “moron”, but they smack just as much of the playground, or the sports pavilion. Sport was a popular reference point: the war against Covid, like the Battle of Waterloo, would apparently be won on the playing fields of Eton. According to McNamara, the health secretary Matt Hancock once batted away her suggestion that he might need additional assistance with the many urgent problems on his to-do list by playing an imaginary cricket stroke, while saying: “they bowl them at me, I knock them away”.
His boast had no basis in reality. Dominic Cummings told the inquiry that Hancock had lied habitually and continuously, giving endless assurances that he had things under control when it would later transpire that he had made no plans at all. But this insouciance was not unique to Hancock. The whole operation appears to have been conducted in an atmosphere of complacency and over-confidence. Of course the men running it had things under control, and of course they would triumph in the end: they were, after all, the government of a country that had conquered half the world, and defeated Hitler, with ingenuity, “character” and “pluck”.
Though they hadn’t all been educated at public schools, the men were evidently following the male ruling-class code which is inculcated by those institutions: never doubt yourself; never admit weakness; use joking and banter to disguise your real emotions (especially fear and sadness, though anger is less of a problem) and to show you don’t take yourself too seriously. Put your faith in the virtues of the gentleman amateur, who succeeds without needing to work at it, and disdain the conscientiousness of the “girly swot”.
Both Helen McNamara and Dominic Cummings were more “girly swots” than gentleman amateurs, though Cummings’s swottishness was of a different, more stereotypically masculine kind (roughly, the policy wonk-slash-tech bro kind), and the fact that he was not a woman gave him a very different status within the culture (though it did eventually turn against him). McNamara was sidelined along with the other, less senior women, and vilified when she resisted being silenced. What I see in her behaviour is not primarily a woman performing kneejerk deference to men in the hope that they will like her better, but an outsider accommodating to the insiders’ culture and language in the hope (vain though it proved to be) that this would enable her to wield some influence rather than none.
Of course, it’s undeniable that McNamara’s outsider status was connected to her sex. But it was also connected to the fact that she was serious in a way many of the men around her were not, and could not tolerate being told they should be. Especially by a woman. The alpha-male if geeky “Dom” could get away with bullying rants, but any woman who tells the boys to stop messing about and be serious reminds them too much of all the female authority figures, like mummy and nanny and matron, whose power they resented when they were actually children—and for that she will be ridiculed and punished.
I’m sure the final report of the Covid inquiry will run to hundreds if not thousands of judiciously-worded pages (the Chair, after all, is a bit of a girly swot), but what we’ve heard so far about the government’s response could be distilled into a much shorter conclusion. We have been ruled for far too long by these entitled puerile fuckpigs, and if we don’t want their incompetence and indifference to kill us all, we need to stop falling for their bullshit and escort them from the building.
language: a feminist guide 