[From MacNamara's written statement about a meeting in the prime minister's study on on Friday, 13 March 2020] I have just been talking to the offici… - Helen MacNamara
" "[From MacNamara's written statement about a meeting in the prime minister's study on on Friday, 13 March 2020] I have just been talking to the official Mark Sweeney, who is in charge of coordinating with the Department for Health. He said I have been told for years that there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan.
We are in huge trouble. I have come through here to the Prime Minister’s office to tell you all that I think we are absolutely f-----.
I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people. As soon as I have been told this, I have come through to see you. It seems from the conversation you are having that that is correct.
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About Helen MacNamara
Helen MacNamara CB (born c. 1976) is a British former civil servant, who served as the Deputy Cabinet Secretary in the Cabinet Office from 2020 to 2021. She had previously worked as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet from January 2019 and was Director General for Propriety and Ethics in 2018. Previous to this, she was the Director General for Housing and Planning in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. She worked for Jeremy Heywood in the Cabinet Secretariat from 2013 to 2016. As a Director in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport she worked on the London 2012 Olympic bid and staging of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Earlier in her career, she worked as Principal Private Secretary to Tessa Jowell and was responsible for setting up the Leveson Inquiry into British media ethics and the subsequent cross-party response.
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Additional quotes by Helen MacNamara
[Boris Johnson's "breezy confidence" about COVID in March 2020] It was the day on which there was a question about whether the Prime Minister should shake hands with people on a visit to the hospital and there was a jokey discussion about alternative greetings to handshakes.
The Prime Minister felt - not unreasonably - that it was a bit ridiculous for him to suggest alternative greetings.
But the jovial tone, the view that in implementing containment measures and suspending work and schooling, the Italians were overreacting, and the breezy confidence that we would do better than others had jarred with me.
I remember saying that I thought that all people wanted to know was what was the right thing to do - and that was not clear.
I do not remember anyone working in the centre or who was part of the conversations who had a detailed understanding of the way the NHS operated.
This is not unusual or unique to that time.
Social policy and the "operational" management of the state is always under-represented in the centre of power whereas HM Treasury, foreign policy and national security are over-represented in line with what is normally the focus for a Prime Minister.
[From MacNamara's written evidence] For example, the long-term impact of a generation of young people being deprived of schooling and peer-group contact for an extended period of time were hard to bring in as a balancing argument because the harm was not immediately quantifiable, or amenable to being reduced into a data set and presented in a diagram.
Similarly, less visible impacts suffer in this format. I remember it being far too difficult to get people to pay attention to domestic violence and lockdown - and the No 10 Private Secretary (Hannah Young) having to push back against the assertion that it was not an urgent problem because it was “not showing up in the data".
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