Last week 100,000 civil servants from 124 government departments went on strike. This fact prompts a number of questions, not least – who knew there were so many government departments? Also, when was the last time anyone saw that number of civil servants?
Since Covid, the most noteworthy thing about the civil service has been that it has completely inverted its working week. Alongside those members who never turn up to the office, a goodly portion have managed to arrange it so that they spend a couple of days a week at their desk and a five-day stretch at home recuperating. Meaning that last week civil servants finally went back to the office in record numbers only in order to stand outside it and strike.
Curtness is apparently to civil servants as sunlight is to vampires
Perhaps it is inevitable that a workforce so lacklustre would be looking for new reasons to do less. The latest tactic is the return of that most fearsome Whitehall spectre: ‘bullying’.
It’s not just the civil service that likes finding and wielding this tool. The Labour party in opposition clearly hopes that we are getting into a sort of mid-1990s dynamic, whereby they can pick off senior Tories one by one so that the government is permanently on the defensive and gets nothing done. You know the tune. There will be a sleaze allegation here, a bullying allegation there, a bizarre sex-death if they’re lucky. So far Labour have managed to bring the word ‘sleaze’ back because of Nadhim Zahawi and his tax affairs. They are clearly hoping to get the Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, next. The charges against him duly relate to bullying. And now more terrible details have come to light.
Raab, you may remember, already stands accused of picking tomatoes out of his lunch salad and throwing them across the room in a fit of fury. Note what he did not do. He did not pick the tomatoes out, tell his underlings to get on the floor and then pelt them with said produce. Perhaps between the time of my writing and your reading this, it will emerge that Raab set up stocks in his office where he bombarded terrified officials with rocket salad. At the moment, though, no human being seems to have borne the brunt of Raab’s physical ire.
But we also learn from Simon McDonald, former head of the diplomatic service, that Raab could be ‘very curt with people’. Oh no, Simon – anything but ‘curt’! Dish out sarcasm, irony, litotes any day. But curtness is apparently to civil servants as sunlight is to vampires.
At least 24 of them have made complaints against the Deputy PM. The allegations – published last weekend – include the claim that Raab could be ‘icy’. An example is that when given a piece of paper from a civil servant he might say things like: ‘This isn’t good enough’. Apparently that could leave officials stammering ‘Er, er’ and Raab would add: ‘It’s not good enough. I can’t accept this.’ According to a witness of one such unforgettable scene: ‘You don’t have to be physically aggressive for people to be scared.’ Another civil servant told the press that Raab apparently ‘doesn’t get that this behaviour is not acceptable in the modern workplace’.
What behaviour? What is this? Why should the Deputy Prime Minister, or anyone else in government, have to treat the civil service like remedial students at a primary school? If their work is piss-poor, why should ‘the modern workplace’ still have to make them feel positive about themselves? What should a government minister say to an official who turns in sub-standard work? ‘Jolly good. Take some more time off. Have a raise’? Is ‘the modern workplace’ the same as a safe space? Or a crèche?
Meanwhile, a new complainant has emerged, and from a most unlikely direction. Gina Miller, of the ‘True and Fair’ party, has accused Raab of disagreeing with her.
Amazingly, the former Brexit Secretary did not get on with the zealot Remain campaigner when they met at the BBC in 2016. She has now jumped on the band-wagon, accusing Raab of calling her ‘stupid’ or ‘naive’ during their encounter. Which I’d say is on the nicer side of things one might have said to Miller, who went on to pretend to be carrying out a strictly non-political, almost drily legal exercise to stall Brexit – one that was in no way a political intervention, because she had no political ambitions. As she showed when she launched that ‘True and Fair’ party of hers last year.
All this has become the subject of a formal investigation led by Adam Tolley KC. And just in case you thought for a moment ‘Ah, at last, a grown-up’, here is the endorsement of Tolley published on the website of his Fountain Court chambers: ‘His written work is excellent and he is very kind so clients trust him. He is also very detailed, his drafting is good.’
When I survey the current state of Britain, apart from needing to lie down, I always face one question. When was it that the grown-ups disappeared, or otherwise chose to vacate the room? How is it that the party of Gordon Brown is simulating horror at the throwing of a cherry tomato? That civil servants complain if someone doesn’t like their homework? That the trial of the Deputy Prime Minister is being carried out by a man who boasts about commendations for his written work and for being ‘kind’? When did we all become such drips?
If I want to cheer myself up, I tell myself that the answer is that not everybody is. It’s just that everybody has to pretend to be. And that’s because at one end people are stuck in a cycle of mock outrage (or fake outrage), while at the other end we have almost nobody in a position of power willing to say: ‘Put a cake in it and get on with your job, you whining, sub-par twot.’ How I wish they would.
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