A former senior United Kingdom Public Servant said he had had to warn former Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab more than once about his conduct as Foreign Secretary while they were working together.
Lord Simon McDonald said Mr Raab (pictured), who was forced to resign after an inquiry found he had bullied Public Servants, was a tough taskmaster whose methods did not help him to achieve what he wanted to do.
“Raab did not listen to the issues raised with him. He disputed it. He disputed the characterisation,” Lord McDonald, who was Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office between 2015 and 2020, said.
Lord McDonald said the high threshold for filing a formal complaint against Ministers meant that Public Servants were hesitant about reporting specific grievances, which Mr Raab “was able to deflect”.
Rejecting Mr Raab’s claims of “activist Civil Servants” trying to block the Government’s work, Lord McDonald said all the bureaucrats he witnessed “worked very hard for him”.
“There is no Civil Service activism, there is no Civil Service passive aggression, there is no separate Civil Service agenda,” he said.
The Institute for Government said claims Mr Raab had bullied staff had led to a complete breakdown in trust between Ministers and Public Servants.
Program Director at the think tank, Alex Thomas said the inquiry had exposed deep flaws in the process for handling poor Ministerial behaviour and that raising a complaint was still seen as “a sure-fire way to end a Civil Service career”.
Mr Raab said activist Public Servants had stood in the way of Ministers’ democratic mandates and that the inquiry had set a dangerous precedent by setting a low threshold for bullying.
General Secretary of the FDA union representing senior Public Servants, Dave Penman called for an independent inquiry into Ministerial bullying and a change to how complaints were handled following the investigation.
However, several Conservatives MPs have spoken out against the inquiry’s findings, including former Minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg who described the complaints against Mr Raab as “snowflakery” in an interview with the right-wing television channel, GB News.
London, 24 April 2023
