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Dysfunction at the centre of government near the start of the Covid pandemic meant “good people were just being smashed to pieces” as officials tried to battle the chaos, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, has told the official inquiry.
Giving evidence delayed from autumn because he was ill, Case, the most senior civil servant in the UK, said on Thursday that when he first arrived in Boris Johnson’s government, as head of the Cabinet Office, he was shocked at the way things were run.
Case described Johnson’s Downing Street as “a rats’ nest”, saying there was a “culture of fear” around Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s then chief aide.
The hearing was shown WhatsApp messages from April 2020 between Case and another then top official, Helen MacNamara, in which Case complained that “we seem to be making everything complicated”.
Case recounted to MacNamara “some minor tussle about who I reported to”, saying: “That really shouldn’t be important in the middle of a mega-crisis.” He added: “Crisis + pygmies = toxic behaviour.”
Asked about the atmosphere at the time by Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry counsel, Case became emotional. He said that reviewing his evidence about the period had been hard “because it reminds me quite how difficult it was that good people were working incredibly hard in impossible circumstances, with choices where it seems there was never right and never a right answer”.
This was made worse by the dysfunction, he said: “Good people were just being smashed to pieces. That’s what I saw.”
In other messages between the pair, in April 2020, MacNamara said about one aspect of the working culture: “The arrogance and the waste. And the contempt for cabinet.” Another message from MacNamara, who in her testimony to the inquiry had been damning about a culture of misogyny, described Johnson’s Downing Street as “the most actively sexist environment I have ever worked in”.
Asked by Keith about Cummings, Case agreed he engendered a culture of fear, and that some people thus refused to work in Downing Street, with one saying: “The setup in No 10 is too mad to touch.”
While not disputing any of the exchanges, Case said the WhatsApp messages were “raw, in-the-moment” expressions and “not the whole story” of the pandemic-era government.
WhatsApp exchanges involving Case seen by the inquiry in the autumn showed him being damning about Johnson’s Downing Street, saying it involved people who were “mad” and “poisonous”, and that the atmosphere meant some people did not want to join the team.
Asked about this by Keith, Case slightly rowed back on his criticism, saying it dated from a time when he “barely” knew Johnson and “didn’t really understand how he took decisions”.
What seemed chaotic was the then prime minister “very much wanting the debate to play out in front of him – competition for ideas and views. I think that is really how he made decisions,” Case said.
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Also, Case argued, the start of Covid was particularly tough for Johnson as at “quite a deep ideological level” the prime minister did not like the need for a lockdown.
Challenged about the widespread use of WhatsApp for policy-based decisions, Case agreed that some of this probably in part breached No 10 guidelines on the use of the messaging service.
However, he said most of his more gossipy complaints would be the “sort of personal colour” that was not normally preserved, and would previously have just been in diaries.
Case was asked why he did not seek IT help in transferring WhatsApp group chats for the inquiry given, as he had said, nine of 39 tranches of messages had been lost in the process.
“I can only apologise,” he said. “It’s my own idiocy and nothing else.”