It’s unfortunate that the epithets “boxing fanatic” and “karate black belt” are so frequently attached to Dominic Raab. When they appear in a news report, these have much the same effect as the words “former nightclub bouncer”. You know the final sentence of said report will simply read: “The trial continues.”
Anyway: the trial continued, until it finally ended this morning with Raab’s eye-bulgingly aggressive resignation letter. How did you enjoy episode 97 of He-Hulk: Attorney at Ministry of Justice? Having been handed the report into Raab’s alleged bullying of staff at three government departments over a number of years, prime minister Rishi Sunak spent a full 24 hours reading it and considering what to do about its findings.
Ironically, if Sunak had worked for Raab, this slow pace of work would have resulted in him getting belittled for being a useless waste of space. The saga ended up dragging on so long that by yesterday evening people had begun to think Raab might actually end up butching it out. Recent changes to the ministerial code meant Sunak now had a wider range of options than merely sacking him or not sacking him. These reportedly included instructing Raab to make a public apology, docking his salary, making him attend an anger management course, or having Black Widow sing him lullabies.
In some ways, then, the resignation is a missed opportunity. What’s not to love about the image of Raab submitting to a mandated anti-bullying training module, his forehead vein going at it like a jackhammer as he punches his way through a series of multiple-choice answers to which the correct one can never be “Shout formatting requests off a Greek paddleboard while the UK literally evacuates an embassy”.
Allies of Raab tended to go in hard on the line that civil servants just need to toughen up – a point typically made by people who wet their pants about a Gary Lineker reply tweet. The general tenor of their defence of Raab’s alleged behaviour is: come on, nobody died.
Actually, hang on. During a discussion of Raab’s conduct, Ministry of Justice officials were told by Foreign Office counterparts that “people had died” in the Afghanistan evacuation because of Dom’s refusal to review documents in formats he didn’t like. Maybe we can split the difference and go with “people died, but not these people”?
Back in that fateful August, the holidaying Raab somehow managed to style out the unforgivable spectacle of having been an out-of-office foreign secretary for an emergency withdrawal that Rory Stewart described as a “total betrayal”. Of the decision to give airport facilities for Pen Farthing’s pet rescue, Raab’s colleague Tom Tugendhat observed: “We’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs; meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.” Boris Johnson called the botched Afghanistan withdrawal “one of the most spectacular operations in our country’s postwar military history” , meaning that, as usual, the diametric opposite may be regarded as the truth.
As for Sunak’s personnel dilemma this week, it’s possible he couldn’t risk merely giving his valued political ally the proverbial slap on the wrist, lest it trigger a Raab countermove that would see Rishi promptly laid out on the rug, with a snarling justice secretary leaning three inches above his face, hissing: “train hard, fight easy.” “Train hard, fight easy” was Raab’s mantra for his 2019 Conservative leadership bid. I don’t need to remind you how that one turned out.
I guess it’s like Mike Tyson said: everyone has a plan until they get oven-readied by Boris Johnson. Even so, I love these little hardman political incantations the guys think will be key to their political success, when 99 times out of 100 they’d do so much better just sticking with that old faithful: “Remember not to be a massive arse.”
Still, it’s been good to hear about workplace snowflakes again from a bunch of people convinced they got their four-bedroom properties, defined pension benefits and free university education by “being tough” and “not buying coffee”. Did you manage to catch stalwart Raab defender David Davis tipping all over the civil service, specifically in terms of millennials’ “lower expectation of work”?
You may remember David from Brexit, where the sometime Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) secretary was frequently photographed grinning above a notes-free section of boardroom table , while the EU representatives opposite – who would go on to best him in the negotiations – peered wryly over their binders. Dominic Cummings once described Davis as “lazy as a toad” , while the former permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office observed that David “could hardly be bothered to go to Brussels”. I don’t know about you but I definitely want to hear much, much more from this guy about how you just can’t get the junior staff to put in the hours.
Speaking of the bizarre double standards of expectation that have been at play throughout this unedifying case, it was Raab who – after he succeeded Davis at DExEU – announced in public: “We are, and I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this … but if you look at the UK and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.” Imagine saying that out loud as a secretary of state, then beetling off to insult some underling for failing to pander to one of your Microsoft Word idiosyncrasies. Ditto Raab’s failure to read the 32-page Good Friday agreement. Raab eventually resigned as Brexit secretary because he couldn’t support a deal he himself had negotiated. But honestly, mate, tell me again how all you demand from people are the same high professional standards to which you hold yourself.
So what now of Sunak, the hardest man in the luxury knitwear aisle? We began the week with the prime minister’s much-vaunted reannouncement about trying to raise standards in maths. We end it with him having reluctantly subtracted one cabinet minister from his table, and under personal investigation for an alleged failure to declare his wife’s shares in a private childcare company that stands to benefit from his government’s plans to get more people to become childminders.
As chancellor, of course, Sunak previously had to eat humble pie after it was revealed he had somehow neglected to get his own wife to pay him tax. We have yet to learn definitively whether, as reported, Sunak was aware of the multiple bullying allegations against Raab when he reappointed him as justice secretary and made him his deputy prime minister. Yet we do know he pledged his government would leave scandal behind – and it’s tough to see how that one is running on anything more than fumes.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
