If Dominic Cummings Were a Woman, Boris Would Have Sacked Him Already
I have spent a lot of my career representing women who have been fired, who have been denied tenure, who after a turf war with a male colleague get frozen out while the man gets promoted. Many decades after equality legislation came into force, this steady stream of cases where capable and excellent women get the short end of the stick remains the simple reality of work. These individual stories assemble into depressing statistics, in Britain, the US and many other countries, showing that on average, women have a harder time making it in professional life than men. They are paid less for the same work. Given a CV to assess, managers will give a male candidate higher marks than a female one, even when the only difference is the first name. Strong women are routinely viewed as screechy or bitchy, while equally strong men are viewed as, well, strong.
Which brings me to Dominic Cummings. I first crossed paths with him 20 years ago, when he was a good source and pal of my husband Jef McAllister, then the London Bureau Chief of TIME Magazine, when Dominic was a wunderkind successfully running the campaign to keep Britain out of the euro. As a dinner guest he was a vigorous talker, full of restless energy, less good at bringing a bottle or writing a thank you note, but always a presence. My 16 year old daughter was intrigued by him and he took her seriously and treated her with kindness. We attended his wedding with Mary and felt the happy bond between them.
If you had told me back then that he might end up advising a Prime Minister, I would not have been shocked. Back then too he was ambitious, clear-eyed, decisive and even (this will surprise some) charming. Had you told me that he would violate lockdown rules meant to protect the public health during a pandemic, fabricate an elaborate tale of a self-administered eye test to justify a 60-mile day trip with his wife and child to a beauty spot on her birthday (his wife is a competent driver) and have the full support of the government in doing so, I would have been disappointed, because his talent and ability seemed harnessed at that stage to political ideals he believed would win because they deserved to win; because they would make Britain better for the majority.
What I saw at his famous press conference in the Rose Garden of Downing Street in May was the opposite, a contempt for higher ideals. Retaining power was the only end, and the ends justified the means. He spun a clever tale, too clever by half in my view, and got away with it. There is a long history of boys raised in privilege and bred for greatness making their way from Eton to Oxford to Westminster believing they are different and better, and often getting reinforcement as they progress. Dominic’s boss Boris Johnson is perhaps the greatest living example of the proposition that privilege entitles one to bend the rules for one’s own pleasure and advancement without serious consequence. Dominic is not an Etonian, and was sufficiently plucky after Oxford to try to make his fortune starting an airline in post-communist Russia rather than rely on connections to glide into the Conservative Central Office. But as it has gained steam, his political career has demonstrated repeated, and cumulatively stunning, contempt for opponents, rules and the truth, and as that strategy has gotten bolder, it has continued to work. As the director of the Vote Leave campaign, he authored the famous, flagrantly untrue, but compelling slogan that Brexit would mean £350 million more per week for the NHS. He was behind the posters showing a horde of Turks soon to flood Britain (EU membership for Turkey is remote to the point of vanishing). In that campaign, he also hid ties to Cambridge Analytica, paid it to fuel a subterranean campaign of influencing people through emotive and misleading social media posts, and, according to evidence released by the Electoral Commission, was central to an electoral fraud and overspending scheme for which Vote Leave was fined £61,000, and then refused to pay.
When a parliamentary special committee sought testimony about all this, he simply refused (the committee lacked the power to enforce its request). Last year he trampled on Parliament again when he devised the strategy of prorogation to prevent it from having a chance to delay Brexit, a position found unconstitutional by a unanimous Supreme Court; but again, he got away with it when Johnson won the election that followed. He calls the Civil Service “the Blob” because it slows him down; he disdains most Tory MPs as weak and wet. He applies Leninist rules of secrecy, concentrated force and ruthlessness to British politics, which have historically depended on the willingness of its main players to respect unwritten norms through self-restraint; and he continues to get away with all of it. He evaded resignation or firing after his driving adventures largely because Johnson is in debt to him for winning the premiership, and needs someone organized and fearsome to help him actually run the government. But another factor is the license we give “great men” to break norms. And so I return to my original point. An underappreciated reason Dominic has amassed an apparently infinite collection of get out of jail free cards is the simple fact he is male.
It’s not a particularly sophisticated question to ask, “Can you imagine a woman getting away with this?” But the answer in this case is so clearly “Never in a million years” that it has provoked me to think some more about the sharp discrepancy between how men and women obtain and wield power. For much of human history, women wielded only soft power — in the home, informally, standing in the background, “behind every great man” — and social expectations of female docility followed suit. Though the last 100 years have profoundly transformed women’s rights and freedoms, these millennia of gender roles don’t give up the ghost easily. As a result, female politicians must walk a pitiless tightrope, demonstrating the strength and decisiveness voters demand and reward in men, without the “shrillness” and “nagging” of which the slightest rise in a woman’s voice is regularly accused. There has been no American presidential candidate of the modern era more flamboyantly ill- equipped for the job than Donald Trump: manifestly crude, ignorant, self-absorbed and incompetent — and that’s what his Republican competitors called him. But even he could beat Hillary Clinton, despite her obvious ability and deep preparation, and an important ingredient was that all of her striving to get ready for the top job had made her “unlikeable.”
To succeed, female leaders have to perform on par with men while paying obeisance to the norms of an idealized 20th century housewife: hypercompetent, dedicated to others, devoid of nasty personal ambition, ethically irreproachable and, ideally, immune even to the common cold. Great Men like Cummings and Johnson get to be ambitious, flawed and still lauded with newspaper profiles about their labyrinthine inner lives, or depicted by Benedict Cumberbatch on Netflix. Foibles are forgiven.
Think of the contrast between what happened to Cummings after he broke lockdown and what happened to Dr. Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s chief medical officer, after she took two trips to her family’s second home during lockdown. She had to resign and Tory ministers intoned this was the right thing to do. They suddenly found sympathy for Cummings as a caring father driving to his parents’ farm, and invoked a loophole for “exceptional circumstances”, one designed to allow victims of domestic violence to leave their abusers during the crisis. That a woman could get away with such behaviour is unthinkable. In representing women in cases of harassment and sexual violence, I see this pattern play out all the time on both sides of the Atlantic — powerful men break the rules; women speak out; the men escape consequence while the women are silenced.
Last year, our client Danielle Bradford sued the University of Cambridge for badly mishandling her complaint of harassment. Though the University found her harasser to be guilty, it refused to publicly identify him and pressured her not to speak about the outcome of her complaint, threatening her that discussing it “could affect [her] place in [her] department,” expose her to discipline and harm her career. All the while, her harasser was still permitted to supervise young women at the same site where he had harassed Bradford. His only ‘punishment’ was to have to send a written apology and refrain from contacting her.
Several months ago my firm settled a four-year legal battle with the University of Rochester in New York, where our clients, nine students and faculty who reported a male professor’s relentless sexual pursuit of his young students, were forced out of the University when they continued to challenge the results of its sham investigation. The professor, Dr Florian Jaeger, received a promotion and still works there. All too often, institutions fight furiously to shield men from taking responsibility for wrongdoing, even at great cost. The perpetrators are free to continue; other men learn to emulate them.
It may be that the Downing Street press conference represented a high water mark for our willingness to give license to testosterone-fueled rule by shortcut. As it turns out, the Johnson-Cummings act has been dreadful at doing what the nation has needed most in time of crisis: protecting public health through a disciplined use of uncertain data, which requires relying on experts from “the Blob” rather than trashing them, and establishing a national consensus based on shared sacrifice, not scare tactics about perfidious Turks or Eurocrats, or special treatment for those at the top. Britain’s performance on coronavirus is the worst in Europe. Its response was sluggish and uncoordinated, the product of glossing over a really hard problem rather than tackling it. Some of the best Covid performances have been in countries led by women: Taiwan, Germany, New Zealand.
If Britain had the coronavirus death rate of the average female-led country, more than 90% of British victims would still be alive. Of course women leaders are not perfect, but to get to the top job they tend to rely on competence and the capacity to build coalitions, good qualities in a health crisis. The worst performances are in Britain, Russia, Brazil, Iran, the USA, all led by preening male egos who want to castigate fake news rather than admit fallibility. All those needless deaths are a tragedy for those whose graves were dug by this style of male leadership. For those who remain, our obligation has to be to put our labour, money and votes to making a more equal world where the Johnsons, Trumps and Cummings seem like dinosaurs.
