Who is Sir Mark Sedwill? Former top civil servant speaks at Covid Inquiry

The former top civil servant is set to give evidence to the ongoing COVID inquiry on Wednesday
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WhatsApp messages sent by the former top civil servant during Boris Johnson’s government have already been discussed during the inquiry, and shed more light on the chaos happening behind the scenes during the pandemic. 

Formerly the country’s most senior civil servant, Sir Mark was a leading figure involved with the UK’s Covid pandemic response. 

As part of the ongoing official Covid Inquiry, his former civil service colleague Martin Reynolds was forced to hand over messages that Boris’ core team shared at the time. 

Messages between Sir Mark and Mr Reynolds — some of which were censored as ‘irrelevant & sensitive’ — were displayed during the UK Covid-19 Inquiry Live Stream. 

In the messages, the pair appear to discuss Covid guidance breaches linked to Dominic Cumming’s Barnard Castle trip and also took aim at Johnson, who refused to sack Cummings at the time.

They also discussed how the recent incidents might be viewed by the public, and those outside the Westminster ‘bubble’. 

“PM has put his own and Gov credibility on the line,” Sir Mark, who was former Cabinet Secretary at the time, wrote. “People are genuinely angry. This isn’t just a bubble story.”

In other messages shared between the two, Sir Mark appear to suggest that he might become Johnson’s scapegoat for Covid-19 failures. 

“If he’s going to try to scapegoat me, he can do so face to face,” another message read. 

Sir Mark stepped down from the civil service in 2020 after 30 years in service. But who exactly is he?

Mark Sedwill stepped down from his role as top civil servant at Britain's Home Office

Who is Mark Sedwill?

Sir Mark Sedwill joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1989, serving in Egypt, Iraq, Cyprus and Pakistan before becoming ambassador to Afghanistan.

He later worked as the Nato Senior Civilian Representative in the conflict-hit country before becoming FCO political director in 2012.

At this point, he was already working his way up through the political ranks. He ran the Home Office between 2013 and 2017 and became a trusted lieutenant of Theresa May when she was PM. 

As Permanent Secretary, Sir Mark oversaw the establishment of the troubled inquiry into the department’s handling of allegations about paedophile activity between the 1970s and 1990s.

He was also forced to tackle the fall-out of the Government’s controversial eBorders programme, after a tribunal ruled the Government should pay out more than £220 million to a US defence firm.

In 2018, he also played a role in the response to the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury. The same year, he was appointed as Cabinet Secretary, making him the most senior civil servant operating within the cabinet. 

Brexit involvement 

Sir Mark, known as a keen golfer, windsurfer and scuba diver, was also the centre of Brexit preparations in Whitehall.

In April 2019, the Daily Mail claimed to have gained a copy of a 14-page letter the Cabinet Secretary sent to ministers warning them of the consequences of a no-deal Brexit.

He rose to the defence of the Prime Minister’s Europe adviser Olly Robbins following criticism from Eurosceptics that he was thwarting the Brexit process.

Former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson accused Mrs May and Sir Mark of badly mishandling the investigation into the leak of information from a top-secret meeting of the National Security Council and called for a probe into it.

Sir Mark was said to be furious at the leak and his investigation was reportedly uncompromising in its dealing with Cabinet ministers and aides, hauling them in for interviews, issuing questionnaires and demanding they hand over mobile phones.

Mr Williamson and his allies claimed his eventual toppling was part of a vendetta pursued against him by Sir Mark.

Sir Mark Sedwill, Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak stand inside the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street

Covid response 

Dubbed the ultimate “securocrat”, Sir Mark was already the civil service’s highest-ranking official when Boris Johnson stepped into Downing Street in 2019.

When the pandemic broke out, he played a role in helping Johnson establish a national response to the outbreak. 

The senior civil servant also made headlines at the time when it emerged that he had been working from home after contracting coronavirus, although No 10 hasn’t revealed that he’d been diagnosed. 

Sir Mark also faced criticisms from the press about his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. 

In 2020, he stepped down from his role, with reports suggesting he also walked away with a  £248,000 payout as "compensation." Reports suggested that he had clashed with the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. 

In an interview after leaving the role, Sir Mark told the BBC that Cumming’s Covid breach “was a mistake - whether everyone should quit every time they make a mistake, I don't think is right”.

He added: “But it clearly undermined the government's coherent narrative about people following the rules.”