Raab vows to launch ‘robust’ defence over bullying claims

DOMINIC Raab will ‘ robustly’ defend himself against allegations of bullying today after his chief critic was accused of ‘sour grapes’.

The Deputy Prime Minister is braced to be grilled over his behaviour when he stands in for Rishi Sunak during Prime Minister’s Questions. The former Foreign Secretary has faced a series of anonymous briefings in recent days from civil servants unhappy about his conduct.

Former Foreign Office permanent secretary Lord McDonald yesterday claimed some officials were ‘scared’ to enter Mr Raab’s office. But he acknowledged that no one had ever lodged a formal complaint. And two Government sources said Lord McDonald tried to extend his contract while Mr Raab was at the Foreign Office, but the request was rejected.

An insider said: ‘It feels like sour grapes to be raising this now.’ Labour has tried to turn the focus on to Mr Raab following the resignation last week of minister Sir Gavin Williamson over bullying claims.

Mr Raab has told friends allegations against him are untrue. Mr Sunak yesterday said: ‘I don’t recognise the characterisation of Dominic’s behaviour.’

The Mail’s readers do not need me to tell them Britain’s migration system is in crisis. More than 42,000 migrants have landed illegally on our shores this year — easily the highest total on record — in what the home Secretary has memorably, if controversially, described as an ‘invasion’.

But where exactly lies the fault for this disaster? Is it in our politicians, who have failed to deal with the asylum issue year after year — or is it in the machinery of the state, on which they must rely to carry out their will?

There is no doubt that ministers, being elected, should bear ultimate responsibility when their policies founder. But that assumes they run departments that are actually prepared to do their work.

Insult

And the fact is that, frequently and increasingly, they do not. Instead, in recent months, various departments have shown a dangerous and growing readiness to leak unfavourable allegations about one minister or another to the media, in a brazen attempt to torpedo the careers of any elected politician with whom they happen to disagree.

This is not just an insult to us voters — who after all are the ones who are truly meant to ‘hire and fire’ governments whose policies we like or don’t like. It is a poison that sickens our very democracy.

Only last weekend, Justice Secretary Dominic Raab — who has developed robust plans to overhaul our country’s entirely unfit-for-purpose human rights legislation — was castigated in a series of leaks to the Press.

The Oxford-educated former lawyer, according to various anonymous briefings (including to the Guardian), supposedly created a ‘culture of fear’ during his previous spell in the same role, which came to an end in September.

Raab has never been the subject of a formal complaint, and a spokesman has insisted he ‘ always acts with the utmost professionalism’.

Yet according to these targeted briefings, his return to his old job last month left several officials so traumatised that they had to find ‘respite’ by moving elsewhere.

What exactly caused this fit of the mandarins’ vapours? One especially bizarre claim was that Raab had once picked the tomatoes from his Pret A Manger salad and thrown them across the room in frustration.

Of course, we were not present at the time — and perhaps Raab really is a monstrous bully. But if the worst allegation against him is that he sometimes took out his stress on fruit and vegetables, it hardly makes him Al Capone.

Then there is Suella Braverman, the home Secretary.

Some four weeks ago, during the brief and benighted premiership of Liz Truss, Braverman was forced to resign as home Secretary on absurdly overblown charges. She was accused of passing an official document from her personal email to a fellow MP.

One Tory MP said the offence was ‘very minor’, adding that most Cabinet ministers had done the same. Yet Braverman has unyielding views on the illegal migrant crisis (to which she is determined to find a workable and lasting solution), is a fierce critic of wokery and is something of a street brawler in the so-called culture wars.

Little wonder that when Rishi Sunak reappointed her to his Cabinet three weeks ago, her return was greeted with ‘despondency’ in the home Office, according to (naturally) the Guardian.

Civil servants fell over themselves to complain about her, with one telling the liberal paper: ‘It was like that feeling you get as a football fan after a long VAR check that disallows a goal’, and another chipping in: ‘Relief was the overriding sentiment when she went.’

In recent weeks, the Leftwing media have run story after negative story about the home Secretary, in a blatant campaign to have her fired.

Braverman has survived — at least for now. But one of her recent predecessors in that great office of state, Priti Patel, was not so lucky.

Patel’s own efforts to get a grip on immigration, epitomised by her £ 120 million scheme to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda, provoked an unhinged backlash within her own department.

A campaign on Twitter (where else?) was launched under the insulting title ‘Our home Office’. (It is of course the voters’ home Office, not the staff’s.)

Contempt

This crusade denounced Patel’s Rwanda plan as ‘racist’, while stickers bearing the slogan ‘ refugees welcome’ were slapped all around the premises.

even more mutinous was a poster that read, in the manner of an undergraduate slogan: ‘We have the spine to say, “No Minister”. No to hostile environments, No to shutting down democracy and No to racist deportations.’

In an online staff meeting (many civil servants rarely bother to turn up to the office these days), the ‘overwhelming majority’ of contributors were negative about Patel. With characteristic perspective, one compared working in the home Office to ‘serving under the Third Reich’.

That wokery has seized the home Office and much of Whitehall is barely in doubt. Mandarins rejoice amid ‘minority networks’, ‘positive action schemes’, ‘ monitoring data’ and training courses in ‘Critical Race Theory’ and ‘Unconscious Bias’ — all farLeft, mostly American imports that have become gospel among the elite.

The Tories might be in office, then, but their ability to implement their agenda is being drastically curtailed by their opponents in the Civil Service, many of whom hold them in contempt.

Much has been said of ‘ the Blob’ — that unaccountable mass that stymies meaningful reform by governments.

Vendettas

But the new trend is for an activist Civil Service, openly leaking about ministers they dislike — and that is worse than the Blob. It’s the Blob with attitude.

Why has the situation deteriorated to such an extent? The truth is that the liberal establishment has never forgiven the Tories for Brexit.

ever since Britain’s membership of the eU came to an end — again, thanks to a resounding democratic vote with which they disagreed — the Blob has been determined to do its worst.

Civil servants are meant to be impartial — and these vendettas against senior Tories undermine the fabric of our democracy.

Just occasionally, the bias i s explicit. As Matthew Rycroft, Permanent Secretary

at the home Office, has all too graphically revealed, there is a streak of arrogance towards the elected politicians that now infuses the department.

At a conference in June last year, Rycroft said there was no need for civil servants to ‘ slavishly’ follow official policy. ‘ It is for us to be stewards’ on some issues, he grandly declared.

Such moral superiority is nothing less than a disaster for this country. No wonder that illegal migration, like so much else, is mired in such chaos.