The delay in Raab’s departure raises inevitable questions about Sunak’s judgement

Editorial: Even a cursory reading of the Tolley report shows a minister unfit for high office

(Dave Brown)

For a man who denies being a bully, Dominic Raab’s valedictory contribution to public life suggests that he is, at the very least, a sore loser and a man who lacks the usual ration of human self-awareness.

In what must count among the most rancorous of farewells, Mr Raab’s answer to Rishi Sunak’s characteristically gentle and overgenerous letter was the kind of aggressive, intemperate fusillade that got him into trouble in the first place.

The ironies are painful. By slamming the door on the way out, Mr Raab made one last display of bullying behaviour, towards Mr Sunak; and he topped even that by claiming that he himself had been bullied out of office.

So bitter and twisted are Mr Raab’s arguments that they merely serve to prove how unsuitable he was to hold high public office. Not only was he a bully, but contrary to the impression he now seeks to project, he wasn’t particularly effective in any of the senior roles he was given.

His brief time as Brexit secretary under Theresa May ended when he quit because he refused to accept the realities of Brexit with which we are now only too well acquainted. Mr Raab was then picked up by Boris Johnson and given the role of foreign secretary and first secretary of state.

He will be mainly remembered in that role for spending too much time on the beach, and for paying insufficient attention to the chaotic British exit from Kabul. Following that fiasco, even the indulgent Mr Johnson had to demote him – albeit with the consolation title of deputy prime minster – to the Ministry of Justice. There, his great project was the “Bill of Rights”. That did not survive Liz Truss’s brief premiership, and has not been revived since.

So, apart from being a case study in ministerial failure, Mr Raab leaves little of value. Deluded to the last, he blames the civil service for blunting all of his radical brilliance. His officials were called “woeful” and “utterly useless”, and he appears to believe they were determined to frustrate him in his role as a democratically elected minister.

Mr Raab claims his “Kafkaesque” downfall will “paralyse the ability of ministers to deliver for the British people”. In a newspaper article notable for its free-range paranoia, Mr Raab lashes out at “unionised officials” as though they were some sort of fifth column.

It is unworthy, to say the least, but it seems to be becoming a trope in rightist circles that various bureaucratic, establishment “blobs” – left-wing and woke to a man and a woman – have spent the last 13 years conspiring to prevent successive Conservative governments from turning Britain into a paradise on earth.

In reality, these politically impartial civil servants have been doing what they are required to do, for every minister of every party, and attempting to make sense of the sort of vague, impossible, cakeist, illogical, impractical, fantastical, self-contradictory, uncosted ideas that make their way into election manifestos (and into the minds of ministers sniffing out a helpful headline).

Even if it were true that the civil service is obstructive (though the purpose of its officials is to speak truth to power), a minister can still get things done without resorting to bullying.

George Osborne, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Suella Braverman, and Mr Sunak himself have managed to push difficult reforms through without being accused of the kind of needlessly arrogant, insidiously aggressive and gaslighting behaviour attributed to Mr Raab by Adam Tolley KC, an independent figure with no axe to grind.

Mr Raab, Priti Patel and Gavin Williamson, all accused of bullying, just don’t seem to be able to behave like grown-ups. That, along with their incompetence, is what marks them out. Most ministers act their age, and the best of them in turn elicit the best outcomes, from the officials working in their private offices and from the wider civil service.

They, unlike Mr Raab, seem to appreciate that times have changed. It is telling that none of Mr Raab’s predecessors at the Ministry of Justice, such as Sir Robert Buckland, David Gauke or Brandon Lewis, saw fit to regard the cohort of civil servants they worked with as an enemy to be ridiculed and humiliated into submission.

Inevitably, the protracted period between the receipt of the report by No 10 and the departure of Mr Raab raises questions about Mr Sunak’s judgement. Even a cursory reading of the Tolley report shows a minister unfit for high office, and Mr Raab should have been sacked as soon as Mr Sunak was apprised of the facts. Instead, Mr Sunak waited, and dithered, and permitted Mr Raab the dignity of resignation rather than dismissal.

This prime-ministerial courtesy was repaid by Mr Raab with some stinging asides in his resignation letter, and a rambling 1,100 word article in the press, published with the intention to inflict maximum damage on the government. If he avails himself of the opportunity to make a personal statement in the Commons, yet more harm will be done to his party.

Mr Sunak’s bigger mistake was to reappoint Mr Raab to government in the first place, and to reinstate him as deputy prime minister. At the point when Mr Sunak did this, he would have been aware of two things. First, that Mr Raab had acquired a reputation, across the various departments he had overseen, for being a bully. Second, that Mr Raab wasn’t a particularly effective minister.

Mr Sunak gave Mr Raab his job and his fancy title back because Mr Raab had been his campaign manager – another mistake – and because he was in too weak a position to do otherwise.

That is also how Ms Braverman returned from the cold, and why Mr Sunak prevaricated over the dismissal of Nadhim Zahawi. There is an unfortunate pattern here, in which Mr Sunak falls victim to a false sense of loyalty to those who don’t deserve it, a misguided sense of justice in the roughhouse world of politics, and an unfortunate sense of political insecurity regarding his own leadership.

As the cliche goes, Mr Sunak needs to be a better butcher. He doesn’t need to turn into a bully, but he does need to start showing a stronger style of leadership. He’s a bit of a “Sir Softy” himself.