‘Dominic Raab: bully or not, he’s an insecure little man who couldn’t run a tap, much less the justice system’
The only time I met Dominic Raab, he jumped a queue. For make-up.
“My daughter laughs at me if I’m shiny!” he told the Sky News make-up lady, demanding she stop what she was doing and powder his enormous cranium before he went on-air. Where, of course, he still looked like a twit, spoke like a twit, and didn’t give a single straight answer.
The powder made no difference to his twittishness. I don’t know the views of the handful of people who’d witnessed his vanity, but I decided that he was either a liar or more worried about his looks than his actions.
Now Justice Secretary and deputy Prime Minister, he’s facing a bullying probe with what seems to be a never-ending stream of complaints from anonymous sources about tiny, laughable issues like “hard stares” and “micro-aggressions”, coupled with major, serious gripes about bullying, intimidation of civil servants, and acting “like a monster”.
There are now 8 formal complaints and reportedly 24 witnesses, over a span of years at numerous government departments, with the scandal reflecting badly on PM Rishi Sunak and whether he appointed his political ally after he knew, or ought to have known, about the allegations.
Raab denies them all, and cannot speak publicly about them during the investigation which is due to end no time soon. But at the same time “friends” have been vocal, and Raab himself says he has “high standards” but also a “zero bullying” approach that meant he had “behaved professionally at all times”.
The thing is this: politics ain’t a profession.
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There’s no entry requirements, no qualifications, and no regulator worth a spit. There’s no training, little oversight, and the disciplinary process is roughly what you’d find on a football pitch in North Korea, if Vladimir Putin was the ref and the only opponent was Kim Jong Un, and he HAD to win or your side would all be fired out of a cannon.
Yes, there’s a process all MPs go through, of working for the party or entering via local politics, the whip system, and seeking and retaining a democratic mandate from the voters. But in effect each MP is a freelance paid a guaranteed £86,500 a year for five years, with office staff paid a pittance and funded by benefactors, businesses or unions, and the boss is whoever their ego decides is the boss.
They might do what the party leader wants, or not. They might do what their noisiest constituent wants. Or they might do a Lee Anderson, and vow to “graft” seven days a week for their party in a video filmed on a hotel balcony in Uruguay during a fact-finding trip to discover why Lee Anderson is such a pr*ck.
No-one in their right mind would let people with such a loose and ever-changing set of rules run a tap, never mind a government department and certainly not the justice system, which exists entirely to punish people who behave like that. And yet, they do, because we vote for them to do it.
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The departments are run by civil servants, who have entry requirements, qualifications, expertise, and processes to follow regardless of which party is in power. But democracy demands they are told what to do by someone elected to see through various policies, and so the poor buggers who actually know what they’re doing get bossed about by whoever has managed to pin the correct colour rosette to their top half.
Anyone who’s ever worked anywhere could see that’s an HR nightmare waiting to happen. The only surprise is that there aren’t more allegations of bullying, sexual harassment, or discrimination.. There’d be fewer personnel issues and slightly more efficiency if you asked the cat to do it.
But – the alternative is the civil servants do it by themselves, with meek politicians merely asking nicely if they’d mind doing it differently. That’s not democracy, and so we hurl vain, twittish people into big, shiny offices where power goes straight to their heads.
Whether Raab is or is not a bully only he truly knows, because it boils down, in the end, to motivation and self-awareness. Did he do the things alleged, did he know it was unacceptable, and do them anyway? Or is he just cocky and cack-handed?
In the long run it doesn’t matter. Bully or not, he appears to be an insecure, pathetic little man who shoves his way through the world, satisfying his vanity. He’s probably no different to 60% of Westminster politicians, and not much better than most.
His seat is thought to be under threat at the next election, like many others, and in the remaining two years of this government we’ll probably see more insecurities emerge in Westminster as egos wobble, tempers flare, and bad behaviour breaks out of wherever it’s barely being restrained in the first place.
But unless and until people vote for competence over aggression, skill over just saying stuff, and prefer a track record to a criminal record, this is the best system we’ve got.
The only upside is that once every five years, we get the chance to fire whichever egotistical basket cases think their boss is someone else.