Whether Dominic Raab is a habitual rotter who has received his just deserts, or a hard-working minister bullied out of office by snowflake civil servants, depends first on your opinion of the man, and then on how you define bullying.
For Raab, Adam Tolley’s report has set the “threshold for bullying so low” that his inquiry has “set a dangerous precedent”. It relies on defining bullying as behaviour interpreted as intimidating or abusive, even if not intended as such. A bully is thus in the eye of the beholder: one man’s abusiveness is another man’s tough leadership style. That’s rather extraordinary.
When one thinks of bullying, one imagines a specific, targeted campaign of abuse or torment. You do not perceive someone kicking sand in your face. They are either doing it or not. So if the civil service is home to a few whining millennials, hostile to the Government’s agenda, and addicted to working from home, then Raab is the victim of his efforts to give them a kick up the arse.
The two incidents for which Tolley “found him guilty” pertain to criticising the performances of particular officials: his honest feedback becomes their bullying. Think back to Priti Patel’s own brush with bullying allegations. In that instance, the ex-Home Secretary was accused of bullying partly for a penchant for asking ‘why is everyone so fucking useless’, a sentiment that no impartial observer of the Home Office could argue is wholly unjustified.
It bares asking: why do these bullying claims seem to apply to right-wing, Brexit-backing ministers pursuing policies with which their own civil servants reportedly disagree? Only last year, elements of the Home Office tried to brief Suella Braverman out of office just as their Permanent Secretary was unwilling to name ‘stopping the boats’ as one of their top priorities.
Hence why Raab feels he is the victim of a conspiracy, especially since these accusations trend back four years but were all announced at once. The report also reveals that a civil servant was reprimanded for spreading “fake news” about Raab – the source of the infamous tomato-chucking allegations.
Some Tory MPs are appalled. Joy Morrissey speaks for many when she laments that “we now live in a country where the definition of bullying includes telling some to for their job” and where “whining, taking offence, and narcissistic victimhood have become the defining characteristics”.
Raab was not pushing officials up against the walls of the MoJ canteen and demanding their lunch money. He would ‘raise his voice’, indulge in ‘hard staring’, expect people to turn up to meetings ‘very, very quickly’ and ‘have the answers to all his questions’. Labelling this bullying is a recipe for civil service lethargy.
This is a win for the Blob, the machine, the footling, inane bureaucracy of the idle perma-state. From today forwards, ministers will find themselves hesitating before reprimanding an under-performing official or criticising sloppy work. Conspiratorial civil servants nursing a Brexit grudge will know any minister is only a few bullying claims away from a resignation.
The duffers triumph, as Sir Humphrey swaddles himself in the cloak of victimhood. One despairs. Any genuine interest in reforming the civil service departed Number 10 with Dominic Cummings. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s post-it note campaign was a tragi-comic substitute for the monumental shift required, and for which Sunak has no time or money.
Nevertheless, once the dust has settled and the media circus has moved on, one might note that Raab’s resignation is not without some upsides for Sunak. We await the Sunday papers to get the full story of what happened between Sunak and Raab last night and this morning. Isabel Hardman suggests the Prime Minister did not ask his Deputy to quit, and that as he said it was “right” for Raab to resign, he was suggesting that he appreciated Raab keeping his word, rather than saying he thought he was a bully.
Sunak will of course miss Raab – one of his first and most vital Cabinet supporters last year, and a loyal Number Two. But Raab was always a slightly odd fit for the Sunak clique: a hangover from Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s eras drawn towards the Prime Minister through a common fear of Trussonomics. If Sunak had stood by Raab, it could have brought civil service resignations, weeks more of turgid headlines, and blessed relief for a Labour Party which has been on the back foot.
By next Monday, we will all be talking about something else. In the meantime, Raab’s departure has also enabled Sunak to switch his de jure Deputy for his de facto one: Oliver Dowden. Dowden is Sunak’s closest ministerial ally. He chaired his leadership campaign, and has, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, been his backroom fixer, spreading his reach out from the Cabinet Office to press Sunak’s agenda through the official machine.
Raab, by contrast, had a department to run, with his Deputy role largely limited to filling in for Sunak at PMQs. He was ceremonial: replacing him with Dowden is the ministerial equivalent of Pepin the Younger packing off Childeric III to a monastery and taking the crown himself.
In a sense, it is a sad end to Raab’s career. He was a genuine contender for the Tory leadership in 2019, but was doomed as soon as he lost the Eurosceptic bloc vote to Johnson. His time as Foreign Secretary will forever be remembered for the Afghanistan debacle, and his time at Justice failed to deliver the ‘British Bill of Rights’ for which he has hankered for so long. Esher and Walton is odds-on to turn yellow.
But in his time on the backbenches, Raab should reflect on why he did not achieve more. Undoubtedly, our civil service is a mess, and ministers have every right to demand high standards and to criticise poor performances. Yet those ministers who are most effective in getting policy through officialdom do not tend to be like Raab. He has a reputation for being prickly: you can think he might not be a bully, but that he could do with reading How to Win Friends and Influence People.
By contrast, an official once told me that Dowden was one of the three ministers (alongside Sunak and Michael Gove) who are best at getting the blob to work for them. Like Gove (most prominently at Education), he exercises a firm grip, knows when to exercise restraint, and can speak softly but forcefully. Raab should know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar: one can be tough, but not cold.
Sunak is an effective minister because he has a phenomenal work ethic and is constantly across his brief. Raab is similar. That the former reached the premiership and the latter did not is not only because of luck and circumstance. It was because Sunak is easier to like. Raab’s fatal curse was his own personality.
He is hard-working, forthright, right-wing, and middle-aged. He was aiming to push controversial measures through in an environment that is increasingly millennial, work-shy, and, for want of a better term, woke. It was a pairing never destined to end well.