DANIEL HANNAN: No prizes for guessing why it’s always Brexiteer ministers who are accused of bullying!
Can it be a coincidence that the ministers being targeted by their officials all voted Leave? Are we supposed to believe that Eurosceptics are unusually given to bullying? Or might it be that civil servants don’t like being told what to do by people whose opinions they resent?
First it was Priti Patel, then Dominic Raab. Now, according to a report in The Guardian (where else?) officials are starting to mutter against Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, who is said to have been too ‘macho’ in trying to get his staff to do their jobs.
Civil servants are supposed to work for their ministers. As the 1985 Armstrong Memorandum on the duties of civil servants puts it: ‘Civil servants are servants of the Crown. For all practical purposes the Crown in this context means and is represented by the Government of the day.’
Officials are meant to be discreet almost to the point of anonymity. Their views should be subordinated to those of their minister, who represents the electorate. In practice, of course, all human beings have opinions and the unavoidable tension between ministers and bureaucrats gave us one of the greatest comedies of all time — Yes, Minister.
According to a report in The Guardian officials are starting to mutter against Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, who is said to have been too ‘macho’ in trying to get his staff to do their jobs
First it was Priti Patel (pictured) who was accused of bullying behaviour in office
In the four decades since those episodes were aired, however, power has shifted decisively from the vote-grabbing minister Jim Hacker to the scheming mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby. Ministers cannot promote, demote or remove their officials. But officials are increasingly able to remove their ministers by the simple expedient of accusing them of bullying.
Bullying, to most of us, means deliberately picking on, intimidating or humiliating someone. This is indeed reprehensible behaviour and no boss should do it, least of all a minister.
But, reading the accusations made against Raab, there was no evidence that he had done any of these things. The report confirmed that he had never sworn or shouted at his staff and that he had never intended to cause anyone offence.
Reading through the list of complaints, some of which came from officials who admitted they had never met the minister, it was impossible not to wonder how any of them would survive in the private sector.
Raab was accused of holding up his hand for silence when an official kept repeating himself; of staring at someone for too long; of throwing the tomatoes from his salad into a bin too forcefully; and of reminding a civil servant what his job entailed. In much the same way, Barclay is accused by anonymous officials of what most of us regard as normal office behaviour: ‘He’s a micro-manager. He hauls people over the coals.’
Raab was accused of holding up his hand for silence when an official kept repeating himself; of staring at someone for too long; of throwing the tomatoes from his salad into a bin too forcefully; and of reminding a civil servant what his job entailed
Some people need to hauled over the coals. Some behaviour needs to be corrected. By the law of averages, there must be officials who are incompetent, workshy or confrontational. Part of a boss’s role is to challenge shoddy work. These days, being a boss is harder and harder. Workplaces are increasingly run by HR departments more interested in diversity targets than output.
Employees are encouraged to define bullying in subjective terms — that is, any behaviour that makes them uncomfortable, even if there is no malicious intent. This is happening in schools and offices all over the country. But it has gone furthest in the public sector, where telling people to turn up to the office, or calling them while they are working from home, can now be seen as harassment.
In the real world, we know that intent matters. There is a huge difference between my stumbling into you and causing you to fall, and my deliberately pushing you over. But that distinction is deliberately blurred when it comes to workplace bullying.
How, one wonders, would today’s ‘snivel servants’ have coped with the ministers of yesteryear. When Labour’s Richard Crossman left office in 1966, he recorded that there was great relief among his officials. ‘The main reason was perhaps because I bullied them and made a fool of them in front of others, quite often their subordinates. I was unpleasant and difficult and brutal in meetings and that didn’t sweeten relations.’
Think back to Gordon Brown’s tempestuous time in Downing Street, when officials had to duck as he hurled mobile phones
Never mind Crossman. Think back to Gordon Brown’s tempestuous time in Downing Street, when officials had to duck as he hurled mobile phones.
Indeed, as recently as 2018, the Labour MPs and Left-wing columnists who now affect to be so outraged by Raab were quite relaxed about what were, by any measure, far more serious bullying allegations against the then Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who ended up being banned from Parliament for life in consequence.
Why? Because Bercow was abusing his office in an attempt to thwart Brexit. Indeed, Labour’s former deputy leader, Margaret Beckett, admitted that the campaign to overturn the referendum ‘trumps bad behaviour’.
Which brings us back to politics. The civil service, for all its theoretical neutrality, has biases that run across every department. For example, at some point during the lockdown, almost all civil servants began to list their pronouns in their email signatures — not something, we may reasonably surmise, their ministers told them to do. Every department is obsessed with identity politics and with promoting people with protected characteristics. Every department wants to remain aligned with the EU. Every department sees net zero as a bigger priority than whatever its notional function is.
Indeed, as recently as 2018, the Labour MPs and Left-wing columnists who now affect to be so outraged by Raab were quite relaxed about what were, by any measure, far more serious bullying allegations against the then Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who ended up being banned from Parliament for life in consequence
READ MORE: Dominic Raab’s camp condemns report that ruled he had bullied and ‘intimidated’ civil servants who complained he interrupted them in meetings – as he is forced to quit government with blast at bureaucrats who ‘can’t hack it’
Dominic Raab, seen leaving his home in Esher, Surrey, today, resigned as justice secretary and deputy prime minister with a furious public broadside at mandarins who could not handle ‘the pace, standards and challenge that I brought’
Then there are the department-specific biases. The Treasury refuses to consider the dynamic effects of tax cuts — that is, the way in which lowering tax rates can stimulate economic activity and so generate more revenue.
The Business and Trade department doesn’t like repealing EU regulations and resists the removal of trade barriers. The Education department is suspicious of any kind of knowledge-based curriculum.
The Home Office hates deporting illegal immigrants — so much so that its officials have gone to court, through their trade union, to challenge the Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
In his previous job at the Cabinet Office, Barclay tried to make the civil service more responsive. Perhaps that is what lies behind the campaign against him.
Or perhaps, having claimed Raab’s scalp, our government machine has moved on to the next Right-leaning minister.
Or perhaps relations were weakened by the pandemic. Most functionaries spent the lockdown at home on full salaries and very few have returned to anything like a normal working week.
Ministers (and some conscientious civil servants) are trying to get staff back to the office. But to someone marinaded in the public sector culture of victimhood, being instructed to get back to work might seem like harassment.
To someone who has been repeatedly told that any behaviour that makes you feel uncomfortable is bullying, being ticked off for any reason — tardiness, slovenliness, refusal to follow instructions —might seem like an assault.
And to someone with an almost religious commitment to woke values, the very fact of being told what to do by a Right-wing Tory might seem intolerable.
Civil servants have brought down a prime minister and a deputy prime minister. Boris Johnson was fatally undermined by Sue Gray, the civil servant who conducted an inquiry into Partygate and who later turned out to have been a Labour supporter all along.
Then Raab was brought down in what looks very much like a co-ordinated putsch.
Ministers must now be looking over their shoulders and wondering who will be next.
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