Which will be the more catastrophic explosion – the SpaceX rocket or Dominic Raab’s career?

Now, I’m not saying things were better when a newspaper columnist was running the country, but it’s also fair to say that he wouldn’t have needed to ‘carefully consider’ (or indeed read) a report before coming to a strong conclusion about what was in it

We are now almost exactly six months into the return of “integrity, professionalism and accountability in government” (copyright Rishi Sunak).

A short highlights reel of professional, accountable government would have to include: a second fine for breaking the law, the reappointment of a home secretary who’d resigned a matter of hours before for breaking the ministerial code, and the rushing out of a seven-figure tax return in the middle of Boris Johnson’s Partygate hearing.

And it would also have to include whatever it was that went on in 10 Downing Street all day yesterday, while Rishi Sunak “carefully considered” a report on bullying by his own deputy prime minister. The barrister Adam Tolley has been compiling his report into Dominic Raab’s conduct toward staff for five whole months; almost the entire Sunak premiership so far.

At time of typing, the report has only been seen by the person who wrote it and the person he’s presented it to, Rishi Sunak. The prime minister has had five entire months to work out what he might do when the report eventually arrives. There are only two outcomes – Raab stays or goes; he did or didn’t bully.

Naturally, we prejudge the report with some trepidation, but five months is quite a long time. In the unlikely event that you had to charge a leading barrister with investigating allegations of bullying against, say, Michael Palin or David Attenborough or Dolly Parton, you would imagine they’d wrap things up rather quicker.

It must be incredibly difficult for the prime minister to have to come to a view of whether the allegations, which include belittling staff, both junior and senior and, “ruining peoples lives” through “coercive behaviour” is what he had in mind when he promised that return to “professionalism and accountability”.

What will he do? He is, we are told, reluctant to get his own ethics advisor, Sir Laurie Magnus, involved, and that’s just as well. When one of the more recent ones told Boris Johnson that Priti Patel had broken the ministerial code, he sacked him instead of her, so if you want to keep up appearances about “professionalism and accountability” it’s probably best not to ask.

Throughout the day, the prime minister’s spokesperson let it be known on several occasions that the prime minister was “carefully considering” the report. Maybe we should be grateful in this era of professional, accountable government that things must be “carefully considered”, even when it’s very, very hard indeed to see how they’re anything other than overwhelmingly obvious. His two immediate predecessors were not known for their “careful consideration”.

Now, I’m not saying things were better when a newspaper columnist was running the country, but it’s also fair to say that he wouldn’t have needed to “carefully consider” (or indeed read) a report before coming to a strong conclusion about what was in it.

Perhaps we should admire Rishi Sunak for being so thorough. For taking his time. When he was chancellor, he got himself into real difficulty by not, for example, checking where his own wife was paying her taxes. More recently, he’d also carelessly forgotten to declare his wife’s financial interest in a childcare company singled out for increased government bonuses. This time, he’s clearly not going to allow himself to make any careless mistakes.

It’s also possible that Sunak has merely been distracted. In the time he has spent carefully considering the report into Dominic Raab, there has been a total eclipse of the sun and the launch of the largest space rocket ever.

As has now been well-documented, that rocket suffered a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” four minutes after take-off. Somewhat bizarrely, the gathered masses at mission control cheered, whooped and hollered when a gigantic explosion lit up the sky.

But at least it was over and done with and the rolling news channels moved on to the next thing. It turns out rapid unscheduled disassembly is spectacular to witness.

By contrast, a slow, grinding, painful attempt to keep everything together when everyone can see it falling apart is far more torturous. The Raab saga, like Raab himself, is definitely going to blow up in the end.