The trials of Dominic Raab
The deputy PM has been forced out of office. Did he do anything wrong? Emily Hohler reports
Dominic Raab was forced to resign as deputy prime minister last Friday, after a report upheld bullying allegations against him. Adam Tolley, a leading employment lawyer who spent five months investigating eight formal complaints against Raab, upheld two serious claims. Raab said that the two adverse findings were flawed and set a dangerous precedent for the conduct of good government.
In his resignation letter, Raab pointed out that Tolley concluded that he had not “once, in four-and-a-half years, sworn or shouted at anyone, let alone thrown anything or otherwise physically intimidated anyone, nor intentionally sought to belittle anyone”. In “setting the threshold for bullying so low”, the inquiry will “encourage spurious complaints against ministers, and have a chilling effect on those driving change on behalf of your government – and ultimately the British people”.
Even the incidents for which Raab was found “guilty” relate to performancerelated criticism and rely on defining bullying as “behaviour interpreted as intimidating or abusive, even if not intended as such”, says William Atkinson on Conservative Home. “There’s something of Salem, Massachusetts about it,” says Matthew Parris in The Times – “never mind arguing about what she has or hasn’t actually done”, throw her in the river and see if the witch floats. “It’s as though we identify and condemn a habit rather than an action.” And why, continues Atkinson, do these bullying claims seem to apply to “Brexit-backing ministers pursuing policies with which their own civil servants reportedly disagree”? Remember Priti Patel? It is not surprising Raab thinks he is the “victim of a conspiracy”, especially since these accusations go back four years but were announced all at once.
We need a better state
I suspect there is a “grain of truth” in Raab’s claim that officials “colluded” against him, says Martin Fletcher in The New Statesman. Most civil servants I know witness the “immense damage” Brexit is doing to the UK and “privately regard it as a catastrophic mistake”. Although that alone would not lead them to try to “subvert” the government, “the Tories’ attitude towards the civil service in general might”.
From the moment Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, the Tories have set out to “antagonise and alienate Whitehall”. Dominic Cummings repeatedly dismissed the civil service as the “blob”. A “succession of permanent secretaries… were ousted for daring to offer the sort of candid, impartial advice that Johnson and his ministers did not want to hear”. Johnson made a failed attempt to “cull 91,000 civil servants” and increasingly, the civil service became a “scapegoat” with the result that the Tories have “turned the ‘Rolls-Royce’ civil service into the timid, ineffectual institution that they always claimed it was”.
None of this is to deny that the civil service is flawed – as officials across all ranks and departments will agree – and reform needed, says Nick Timothy in The Telegraph. Senior officials tend to “duck responsibility for detail and delivery”. There is insufficient challenge, too little specialism and too many generalists. We need a machine capable of responding swiftly to events, of developing and implementing policy, and running operations effectively.
The solution requires “careful consideration”, but change must be “radical”. Staff numbers should be halved, pay doubled and contracts and pensions reformed to allow for greater staff mobility. At present, it “does not recruit or retain the best people, it does not provide the right expertise, it does little to address Britain’s short-termism, its use of patronage can be self-serving. If we want better government, we need a better state.”