Obituary
With any luck we’ve seen the last of this jumpy little bully-boy.
Reading the report I recognise the exact same pattern of bahaviours I’ve witnessed across multiple industries from various ‘Project Manager’s who are technically, emotionally and empathetically way out of their depth.
Good riddance to all and any of them.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1152026/2023.04.20_Investigation_Report_to_the_Prime_Minister.pdf
The reasons why he was forced to resign struck me as slight. He’s clearly an unsympathetic character and apparently not terribly competent, but accusations of petulant tomato throwing (and that not even at anyone) is a pretty low barrier for dismissal. Glad though I am that he’s gone, I had expected something more substantial than the report seems to deliver.
Is that you, Dom?
It struck me that there were other incidents. How bad they were we will never know, as the report’s author makes a point of saying he can’t disclose them because that would betray confidentiality.
Jump or pushed?
Predictable moaning from certain quarters about snowflakes and a conspiracy in the Civil Service to target him.
Saw the headlines on the usual suspects at Booths this morning. Something along the lines of ‘Is this the day Britain became ungovernable?’
According to the Mail it’s the end of the world as we know it. In this case, I feel fine.
@thecheshirecat
You didn’t happen to see the Fail’s view on how this might affect house prices?
I didn’t. I never go beyond the headlines as I would get too upset. But isn’t it the Express’s job to relate everything to house prices?
Only when they can’t relate it to Princess Diana’s death.
I don’t expect this to be the end of Raab’s political career. A couple of years of lying low, possibly less, and he’ll be back as if it all never happened.
Possibly with a passing mention of Madeline McCann.
Like an (oh my splitting sides) Es(c)her drawing?
In 2019 he only had a majority of a couple of thousand in Esher, thanks to what looks like tactical voting from Labour voters lending their votes to the Lib Dem from the graph in the link. He’ll be in very shaky ground come the next GE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esher_and_Walton_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
What a piece of work.
Gratifying to see that the Mail and Express are lumping on… anything they and their readers think – Brexit anyone? – I am duty bound to think the polar opposite.
Life would be much tougher to navigate without them.
“If the bar, the threshold for bullying is lowered that low” – so he still thinks it’s OK to bully even at a low level.
The type of behaviour he exhibited is, as others have said, typical of an incompetent idiot who is out of his depth.
I worked in the coal mines as an electrical engineer and we had people in managerial roles who acted like him. They only got away with this behaviour once and were soon put in their place. That’s if they decided to hang around long enough.
I’ve encountered workplace bullies before – in my view, they are the lowest form of life. Raaaab is typical of them – self-righteous, self-important, entitled and basically a sh*t. Personally, I wish him nothing but failure and ignominy. His entire party in recent years seems to comprise truly objectionable people – the sooner they are consigned to the dustbin of history the better. (I say this from a neutral standpoint – not the usual left/right, Lab/Con tribal position.)
A nephew of mine works deeply in the surrounds of No.10. He is normally very tight-lipped about what goes on there but a few years back after a couple of bottles of wine, he couldn’t help but utter “Raab, what an utter loud-mouthed arrogant arse. Shouts at people, rubbishes them in front of colleagues. A complete arse. Any more wine left?”
In my old business world, managers took someone he/she was dissatisfied with into a quiet space and began things by saying “I’m not happy, are you?” Not so with Raab it seems.
Obnoxious piece of work. Thank God there were people prepared. to stand up to him and speak out. It might encourage others to act in the same way and help purge the govt of other similar characters of which I am sure there are many.
I worked in Whitehall for a number of years, and you soon heard who were the ministers who were out of their depth or tough to work for. The brighter ones always listened and were pleased to hear advice – whether or not they followed it was another matter.
Yes Minister, whilst being outrageously funny and uncannily accurate in many respects, did rather plant the seed of the idea that the civil service were somehow in control of the country. If only….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/21/dominic-raab-hardman-rishi-sunak-scandal
My daughter, Ms Attackdog was a Civil Service Fast Stream promoted to Dept of Justice. She’s worked directly with the Raabster (and previous Justice secretaries), in his large open plan environment. Whilst she was never the subject of his appalling behaviour, she described him from near hand as ‘an absolute c..t’.
Let’s hope he rots in hell.
Oliver Dowden as deputy PM! What a sorry state we are in if that wimp’s the best on offer.
It seems to be the modern way for people in power to take absolutely no responsibility for anything they do or say. Whenever these ghastly people are called to account (Johnson, Trump, etc.), they cry that it’s because of some conspiracy, or a misunderstanding, or wokeness/snowflakes and other meaningless ideas.
In the good old days (the 1960s, let’s say), people would resign at the merest sniff of bad form: Profumo, to pick a name, went even though (IIRC) it was never confirmed that he gave away state secrets. Now I imagine he would hang on until the bitter end while his cronies and the Mail monstered Ms Keeler and said everything had been blown out of proportion. And I’m sure there are examples of ministers resigning simply because some minion in their department fouled up on something said minister had no knowledge of or involvement in.
How refreshing it would have been if Raab had immediately said, “Yes, I have behaved badly, and not like a senior figure in government. I am resigning to live a better life and do good works.”
Profumo went on to be honoured (CBE I think) in the seventies.
Received for services to charity
Profumo wasn’t forced out because he gave away state secrets.
He was forced out because he lied to the HoC (something Bojo seemed to do on a pretty regular basis)
Fair enough. Lying to the House seems so common now that I must have forgotten that was the cause of JP’s downfall.
Anyone who says “I am sorry if anyone has felt offended by anything I have said or done” is (a) not really sorry for what they have done and/or (b) a complete see you next Tuesday.
Any boss who says “some members of my staff have it in for me” is definitely a (b).
“Somebody’s got it in for me…”
– Raab is the very definition of Idiot Wind.
And he’s planting stories in the press.
From inews.
ree smog fights dirty.
Sunak and Dowden decide to trot round to Matthew Parker Street to see how the latest polls are responding to Rishi’s ‘commanding’ removal of Raab from office, only to find Dom preparing to write another searing Daily Telegraph article with the support of loyal CCHQ staff
Reading the report was like wading through treacle. Raab will select the parts where there was no reasonable evidence of his behaviour being out of line and gloss over the parts where he is found beyond reasonable doubt to have been a total arsehole.
The fact that the report is there at all should tell him everything he needs to know, but I’m afraid he’s another politician who had achieved great success very quickly by exploiting chaos. Rather than work with his people, he has doubled down on the arseholery – thinking this will carry him all the way to No 10. The reality is that the good people of Esther and Walton-on-Thames are likely to send him packing. Locally, he has achieved the almost unthinkable – turning one of the safest Tory seats in the UK into a marginal one.
I’ve had demanding bosses with high standards who made me better by making me raise my game and succeeding. I’ve had a few bullying bosses who are inadequates who use their position to feel more secure by being utter bastards. These people undermine your confidence and make you feel like shit. I think I can see which category Mr. “Dover is near France!” fits into. Good riddance.
Just when it was starting to look promising for KS, along comes Dianne Abbott.
What with Raab losing his job and Corbyn and Abbott losing the Labour whip, that HoC naughty step is getting mighty crowded
I think we’re up to 16 MPs currently without their party whip.
The Abbott thing is weird. I get that you can accidentally press Send on the wrong version, but how can you accidentally write the draft racist diatribe in the first place?
Quite. Surely the first version is where you write down the points you want to make before tidying them up for publication.
The whole thing is baffling. Why, after recent history, would she even want to mention Jewish people in a context like that? Whatever she meant by it, her letter was poorly worded and quite astonishingly badly timed.
I’ve seen many tweets from Jewish people interpreting her words as practically comparing the Holocaust to people being teased for being ginger. I’ve seen many tweets from black people defending her, saying that skin colour is indeed the basis for the worst discrimination in modern Britain. (Both sides shouting “racist!”).
I don’t often refer to public figures as “thick” – I think doing so nearly always says more about the name-caller than the callee – but Abbott and Truss are two prominent politicians that have consistently given off that particular vibe.
Diane Abbott is not thick, she’s just not as properly in touch with reality as she ought to be. Which is a shame. Maybe time to retire.
DA hasn’t been properly in touch with reality since her disastrous police funding farrago of 2019. Merely an embarrassment then, she’s now become a liability.
The fault for this must surely lie with the people around her who really should sit her down and tell her that it’s time to go.
Didn’t she blame the inability to differentiate thousands from billions on a diabetic crash?
As a Ginger, I’ll be intrigued to hear her explanation this time.
Her “explanation” is every bit as bizarre as her letter.
As an Irish person whose parents experienced the “No Irish, no blacks, no dogs” racism of the 40s and then had to grin and bear “thick paddy” jokes well into the 80s, I’d love to see DA “diabetic crash” her way out of that one.
Over the years, as part of my job, I’ve had to hear appeals from employees who were being disciplined for anything from theft, absenteeism through to bullying. Bullying cases weren’t that frequent as they were usually difficult to investigate and there’s no legal definition of bullying itself. As a consequence those that resulted in action and appeal tended to be fairly clear cut – there was usually more than one complainant, there were witnesses, sometimes there would even be emails or text messages.
I was always conscious that making an allegation of bullying is pretty high risk for the person concerned. Significant amounts of bullying go unreported, because the prospect of a complaint just making things worse is a major deterrent. I saw a number of cases where an initial single complaint mushroomed into multiple complaints as other victims came forward once investigations started.
Every single case I heard included the subject of the investigation claiming that they were “demanding” or “robust” but always “fair” and that they wouldn’t allow “fragility” to stand in the way of high performance. Most would fall back on analogies about heat and kitchens or pressure making diamonds, and more often than not they would also claim to be the actual victim.
I haven’t had to hear an appeal since the pandemic; this case, and reading the report brought back a lot of unsettling memories. It strikes me that the report was framed in such a way to offer as light an assessment as possible, and despite this there was still too much to allow Raab to brush this off. His behaviours, the number of instances raised, and his self serving comments since are so unpleasantly familiar. And lets remember Gavin Williamson resigned for the same reasons whilst Patel was saved by Johnson, prompting a £370,000 settlement to former Home Office Secretary Sir Philip Rutnam and the resignation of Alex Allan, Johnson’s independent adviser on the ministerial code.
Out in the real world all 3 would have be fired. Instead one has been knighted, whilst another is thought to be on Johnson’s resignations honours list. All 3 continue to be deemed fit to represent their constituencies.
Excellent post F8.
From a professional standpoint, having investigated oodles of ER issues and employee complaints, this sounds familiar…
That sounds very similar to the scenarios described by (HR manager) Mrs F.
Assuming KS gets into No 10 (and fingers crossed he will),
be interesting to see how long it will be before a high-profile
Labour pol is accused of bullying.
Gordon Brown’s reputation for his “robust” handling of his staff
when PM is already being raked up by various media outlets
Just watching the BBC 4 repeats of Ripping Yarns on iPlayer – in Tompkinson’s Schooldays, Grayson, the school bully, is taking up a new position at Eton as their schools bully as the previous one has just left to join the government……
Excellent timing by the BBC.