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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the spectators' daily politics podcast.

I'm Cindy you and I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and Katie Bills.

So another day, another day of the COVID inquiry and another star witness.

It's about today, it was the turn of Helen McNamara, the former Deputy Cabinet Secretary to

turn up in front of the inquiry. What does she have to say because what people knew her for

off before is that she provided the jukebox at one of the leaving parties during party gate.

Yeah, I think it was actually karaoke. Oh, sorry my bad size, which is obviously, you know,

much less egregious. Yeah, it was an interesting session. Look, in lots of ways we're not learning

anything particularly surprising that's changing anyone's mind about what was going on in

government, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. But what we're getting and what you'd

hope the inquiry would then be able to distill into lessons learned is a picture of a government

that wasn't being run properly and it was able to not be run properly and no sort of checks and

balances on that. And she described a macho culture also a sort of cognitive disconnect in the way

that lockdowns were approached. So she had a witness statement where she talked about the lack

of a female perspective on the crisis, including a lack of thought about childcare,

the impact of restrictions on victims of domestic violence and the lack of guidance for pregnant

women. She also wrote that a disproportionate amount of attention was given to the impact of

lockdown on male pursuits, citing football, hunting, shooting and fishing. That's probably a

particularly particular type of male who has those pursuits as well from a particular social

...