At what point does one decide to report a case of workplace bullying? Week after week, we witness the distressing spectacle of Sir Keir Starmer trying to beat up Rishi Sunak.
“Oh come on!” Sir Keir cried in an incredulous tone as Sunak cowered behind the Independent Adviser on Ministers’ Interests. “Was he just too incurious to ask any questions?”
“No issues” were raised with him, Sunak asserted. Nowadays this whole subject is enveloped in a coating of the blandest euphemism. “Issues” always means something pretty bad.
“Nobody told me, I didn’t know, I didn’t ask any questions,” Sir Keir taunted him. Sunak was the only person who pretended not to have heard of the allegations made against Dominic Raab.
This was classic playground bully behaviour, inciting the other children to laugh at some poor little weakling, smaller than the bully and most likely new to the school, so unable to stand up to himself.
We began to think of the terms in which we would compose our letter to the Independent Adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus. Sir Keir…distinguished human rights lawyer…should know better…each week unable to control himself when he sees poor little Sunak, who is two inches shorter than him…goes for him without mercy…no consideration shown for Sunak’s pitiful weakness in the polls…video footage exists of the beatings, which occur weekly in the lunch hour…Sir Keir’s gang do sometimes have the decency to look sickened, or at least bored, as he launches his assaults, but often they cheer him on…No civilised society can tolerate such hooliganism…Unacceptable example to the nation’s youth…
Plenty there for Sir Laurie to get his teeth into, one would have thought, and as for the technical point that Sir Keir is not yet a minister, he very much hopes to be, so surely it is in the public interest for a ruling to be made on whether or not he is a fit and proper person.
But what was happening now? Sunak was hitting back. He said one of Sir Keir’s MPs had been “forced to speak out because being in his party had reminded her of being in an abusive relationship”, only for Sir Keir’s own office to be “caught undermining her”.
“If he can’t be trusted to stand up for the women in his party,” Sunak declared, “he can’t be trusted to stand up for Britain!”
Could it be we had misunderstood this playground brawl? Should we actually be reporting Sunak for bullying the poor, inept Leader of the Opposition?
Sir Keir said Raab was facing “24 separate allegations of bullying” and some of the complainants “were physically sick”, while one was “left suicidal”.
How would Sunak feel “if one of his friends or relatives was being forced to work for a bully simply because the man at the top was too weak to do anything about it?”
Again the charge of weakness, but Sunak refused to live down to it. He accused Sir Keir of siding “with extremist protesters and union bosses”, “sitting on the fence” and “carping from the sidelines”.
On consideration, this does not seem the week in which to submit an official complaint about Sir Keir, for he had once again tried and failed to bully Sunak, who showed, indeed, every sign of being able to stand up for himself.
Could it be that Sir Keir is not actually much good at being a bully? Might he deep down regard Sunak as a decent guy, with whom he would like to make friends?
One cannot repress the feeling that as with those wrestling bouts shown on the telly, PMQs is just now a bit of a put-up job.