Helen MacNamara


Helen MacNamara is a British civil servant.

Education and early career

MacNamara studied history at Clare College, Cambridge.
Before joining the Civil Service, MacNamara was a new media entrepreneur. In 2002 she joined the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, working as principal private secretary to Tessa Jowell and on London's bid and preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games. In 2010 she was appointed director for media policy, and was responsible for setting up the Leveson Inquiry.
From 2014 to 2016 MacNamara was Director of the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat at the Cabinet Office, where she coordinated government preparations for the 2015 United Kingdom general election. In late 2015 she was involved in a tribunal case in which she argued that the frequency of cabinet committee meetings should not be made public. The Information and Rights Tribunal described her as "evasive and disingenuous", and her evidence as "fundamentally flawed and of no value whatever". From July 2016 to April 2018 MacNamara was Director General of Housing in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. In May 2018 she succeeded Sue Gray as Director General of the Propriety and Ethics Team in the Cabinet Office.

Director General of Propriety and Ethics

In September 2019 some MPs called for MacNamara to investigate Dominic Cummings, an aide of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, after Cummings dismissed a Treasury aide, Sonia Khan. In February 2020 former special advisers called on MacNamara to defend the workplace rights of ministerial aides, amid further complaints about Cummings' behaviour. In February 2020, after claims that Home Secretary Priti Patel had bullied aides, The Times claimed that MacNamara "blocked" Patel's request for a formal leak inquiry into the claims, though the Cabinet Office denied that a formal request had been made. MacNamara's report into the bullying allegations against Patel were delayed by the Prime Minister's hospitalization in April. The Labour Party called for the report to be made public, and repeated the calls in mid-July amid rumours that MacNamara was resisting pressure from Downing Street to exonerate Patel. A few days later, it was announced that MacNamara was to leave her job the next month, to become permanent secretary of an unspecified government department.