DOMINIC Cummings has denied being a misogynist after he was confronted over a text he sent about a female colleague saying he wanted to “handcuff her and escort her” out of Downing Street.
Boris Johnson’s former top adviser was taken to task over texts he sent during the pandemic and was asked whether he had contributed to a “toxic culture” at the heart of power.
The Covid-19 inquiry on Tuesday was shown disparaging Dominic Cummings sent about then deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara in 2020, in which he said he would “handcuff her and escort her” from Downing Street.
Cummings wrote: “If I have to come back to Helen’s bullshit with [propriety and ethics team] – designed to waste huge amounts of my time so I can’t spend it on other stuff – 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 c***.”
In another message shown to the inquiry, Cummings said she had to be removed from her post and instead tasked with “building millions of lovely houses”.
Counsel to the Inquiry Hugo Keith KC asked Cummings that he “denigrated women” and “denigrated Helen McNamara” by sending her a misogynistic message.
Cummings responded: “No that’s not correct. I was not misogynistic.
“I was much ruder about men than I was about Helen.
“I agree that my language is deplorable, but as you can see for yourself I deployed the same or worse language [for] the prime minister, secretary of state or other people.
“If you want to look at how we actually ran things, unlike Whitehall, I had two young women as my deputies, I hired young women into the data science team, in the Vote Leave campaign I actually put a woman in her 30s in charge of it much to the rage of a lot of MPs.
“So if you look at the reality of how I actually ran teams, and how they got on with the private secretaries in Number 10, you will see the truth of the matter.”
He said the outbursts about MacNamara were in response to Johnson’s failure to sack her despite his intention to do so, which Cummings said had caused tension in Downing Street.
He added: “Now, my language about Helen – the language is absolutely appalling and actually I got on well with Helen at a personal level – but a thousand times worse than my bad language is the underlying issue at stake that we had a Cabinet Office system that had completely melted and the prime minister had half begun the process of changing the senior management and then stopped.”
Elsewhere, Cummings painted a picture of “chaos” at the heart of the Government in the early days of the pandemic.
He revealed that on the week beginning March 9, 2020, he heard colleagues having phone calls about whether councils could use ice rinks as temporary morgues as he realised he was living through a “historic catastrophes”.
He said: “In the week beginning the ninth… I had growing doubts on an hourly basis.
“By the 11th my view was, I’ve got an appalling feeling that I’m in one of those historic catastrophes, like July 1914. I’ve got a lot of smart people coming to me saying a) the fundamentally the strategy is wrong, misconceived, but also at a practical level.
“At this point remember I was sitting in an office and suddenly overhearing people having phone calls about whether local authorities could book out ice rinks and get trucks to carry massive numbers of bodies and store them in ice rinks.
“These conversations suddenly exploded in the week of the ninth.
“So on the one hand a fundamental argument is the strategy misconceived or not, but we also had this sort of growing cascade of nightmare conversations going on around us where we realised that the system was just completely out of control in terms of coping with its original plan A.”
