Johnson government's chaos has torn good people to pieces, Case tells Covid inquiry | Covid investigation

Dysfunction at the center of government at the start of the Covid pandemic meant good people were simply broken as officials tried to tackle the chaos, Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, told the official inquiry.

Testifying delayed from the fall because he was ill, Case, the UK's most senior civil servant, said on Thursday that when he first arrived in Boris Johnson's government, as head of Cabinet Office, he had been shocked by the way things were handled. .

Case described Johnsons Downing Street as a rat's nest, saying there was a culture of fear around Dominic Cummings, Johnsons then chief aide.

The hearing was shown WhatsApp messages from April 2020 between Case and another senior official at the time, Helen MacNamara, in which Case complained that we seemed to be making everything complicated.

Case recounted to MacNamara some minor arguments about who I reported to, saying: It really shouldn't matter in the middle of a mega-crisis. He added: Crisis + pygmies = toxic behavior.

Asked about the atmosphere at the time by Hugo Keith KC, the attorney in charge of the investigation, Case became emotional. He said it had been difficult to review his testimony about this period, because it reminded me of how difficult it was for good people to work incredibly hard in impossible circumstances, with choices for which it seemed There was never a right answer or a right answer.

The situation was made worse by dysfunction, he said: Good people were just being torn apart. This is what I saw.

In other messages between the two men, in April 2020, MacNamara spoke about one aspect of work culture: arrogance and waste. And contempt from the Cabinet. Another message from MacNamara, who in his testimony to the inquiry had been damning about a culture of misogyny, described Johnsons Downing Street as the most actively sexist environment I have ever worked in.

Asked by Keith about Cummings, Case admitted that he had bred a culture of fear and that some people were therefore refusing to work in Downing Street, with one saying: The No 10 facility is too crazy to touch.

While not disputing any of the exchanges, Case said the WhatsApp messages were crude, snapshot expressions and not the whole story of government in the pandemic era.

WhatsApp exchanges involving Case seen by the inquiry in the autumn showed him damning about Johnsons Downing Street, saying it involved crazy and venomous people and that the atmosphere meant some people did not want to join the 'team.

When asked about it by Keith, Case walked back his criticisms slightly, saying they came from a time when he barely knew Johnson and didn't really understand how he made decisions.

What seemed chaotic was that the Prime Minister at the time really wanted the debate to take place in front of him, in a competition of ideas and points of view. I think that's really how he made his decisions, Case said.

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Furthermore, Case argued, the start of Covid was particularly difficult for Johnson because, at a fairly deep ideological level, the prime minister disliked the need for a lockdown.

Asked about the widespread use of WhatsApp for political decisions, Case acknowledged that some of these measures probably partly violated Guidelines No. 10 on the use of the messaging service.

However, he said that most of his more talkative complaints were about the kind of personal color that was not normally preserved and would previously have been simply in diaries.

Case was asked why he didn't seek help from IT to transfer the WhatsApp group chats. As he said, nine of the 39 message chunks were lost in the process.

I can only apologize, he said. It's my own idiocy and nothing else.