The Right Honourable Mr. Dominic Raab reluctantly stepped down as the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State for Justice on 21 April 2023-the day after a “Report of formal complaints” against him was first seen by his Prime Minister. The report was compiled by Adam Tolley, KC, of Fountain Court chambers, at the Temple in London. Mr. Tolley is a specialist in commercial litigation, employment law, and tax, whose “cases often involve issues which require cross-disciplinary expertise.” Mr. Raab protested the report’s “flawed” adverse findings and claimed that it “set a dangerous precedent for the conduct of good government” by “setting the threshold for bullying so low.” He also said he was “genuinely sorry for any unintended stress or offence that any officials felt” as a result of his actions. Nevertheless, he concluded that he had fallen victim of “activist civil servants” and that “the Kafkaesque saga I endured was shorn of the safeguards most people enjoy”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appointed Adam Tolley on 23 November 2022 to investigate two formal complaints about Dominic Raab. The Terms of Reference of the independent investigation were subsequently to include a total of eight formal complaints. The initial two complaints, about Mr Raab’s conduct at the Ministry of Justice and at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Department, were lodged on 15 November. A third complaint about Mr Raab’s conduct at the Department for Exiting the European Union was made on 23 November, and followed by a further five complaints about his conduct at the Ministry of Justice. All the complaints concerned fractious relationship between the Minister and his civil servants and were investigated under the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes of Conduct, on a “consensual basis” with Mr. Raab, while protecting the confidentiality of participants. Mr. Tolley observed that “’bullying” is neither a legally defined term nor a defined term under the Ministerial Code. For the purposes of the investigation, bullying was characterised as “offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour; or, abuse or misuse of power in ways that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.”
The investigation was not a formal process of litigation and “was not governed by any strict rules of procedure or evidence.” It consisted of 66 interviews, between 20 December 2022 and 3 April 203, and 44 pieces of written evidence, either as statements or responses to template questionnaires.
Two of the eight complaints were upheld in the 48-page Tolley Report. As Foreign Secretary, Mr Raab had taken issue with the actions of a senior negotiator during Brexit negotiations on Gibraltar with Spain, while as Justice Secretary he had provided overly critical feedback to senior civil servants on three separate occasions. The report confirmed that responsibility for line management of civil servants lies with the Permanent Secretary of the department and not with the Minister responsible for that department. It also highlighted a lack of clarity over whether it was appropriate for a Minister to provide performance feedback to civil servants. In the case of Mr. Raab, the report noted that he was at times reluctant to accept civil servants’ advice about, or criticism of, his policy decisions and was prone to resort to threatening and intimidating physical gestures to make his point. In mitigation, his behaviour may have been “abrasive,” but was not considered “abusive”.
The report was based on mostly non-specific allegations about past events, sometimes with no available supporting documents, and there were no contemporaneous adverse comments about Mr. Raab. It uncovered tensions between a “demanding, driven and focused on detail” Minister and civil servants who were perceived to be operating at cross-purposes. Such workplace tensions are by no means new in Whitehall, where the interactions between Mandarins and Ministers have featured at great length-in prose, fiction, and even television drama.
While I lack direct knowledge of the machinery of government, there appear to be some similarities between the current workings of Whitehall and recent practices in the world of surgery, where the workplace culture had prima donna surgeons throwing tantrums in the operating theatre, terrifying nurses and surgical assistants in the process, and also belittling junior staff on the wards and at meetings-all in the name of ensuring high standards. Surgeons of this era were frequently described as “perfectionists” who “would not lightly tolerate fools.” Such behaviour, inconsistent with the changing workplace culture of today and is detrimental to the mental health of employees, has been gradually eradicated, courtesy of hospital management and the General Medical Council. It would seem that Whitehall may also benefit from some gentle tweaking of its modus operandi, with particular reference to the working relationships between Ministers and senior civil servants and the handling of complaints arising from the breakdown of these relationships. Healthy government demands respectful and collaborative partnerships at the highest levels, all in the best interests of the nation at large.
Ashis Banerjee