In her evidence to the Covid-19 inquiry, the former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara said that the narrow backgrounds of both ministers and civil servants meant they were taking decisions for the whole country without a real sense of the wider public’s lives. She highlighted a lack of recognition of the inequalities that vulnerable and disadvantaged people face, alongside “superhero” egos and “nuclear levels” of confidence on the part of the decision-makers.
I recognised those points from my time in government, and I had a name for it: entitlement syndrome.
