123. DOMINIC RAAB RESIGNS

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1:21Welcome to our first RESTIS Politics Emergency Pod so -called in quite a while with me, Mr. Campbell, And with me, Rory Stewart. Bit of a pause there, Rory. Was that drawing something? I think it's jet lag getting away. OK, fine. Anyway, we're here. You pressed the emergency pod button, which we haven't done this all the time. No, you've just said the list has pressed it. Very good. Yeah. And emergency pod button is on Dominic Rob. Should I give a little quick summary of Dominic Rob? Yeah. So Dominic Rob, who was the deputy prime minister, and the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, previously Foreign Secretary, a very, very well -known voice in the Brexit campaign.

2:01Somebody who joined Parliament with me in 2010, somebody I know quite well. Been accused a number of times of bullying and he denied it and said that he would like an independent report to be commissioned into whether or not he had actually been bullying civil servants. That's the allegation. And a King's Council, barrister called Mr. Tolly, He did a report and came back in the report and found that on a number of occasions he felt Rob had been bullying. And Rob said that if that had been discovered he would resign. This has come out, he's resigned. Although he's written a letter which basically says that he's resigning because he said he'd resigned, but he doesn't really recognize the description of his behaviour and he thinks that it is dangerous for ministers to be driven out by allegations of bullying because it stops them being able to challenge civil servants over you.

2:59I mean, I think it was inevitable because I really don't go along with the, or try not to go along with the whole no -smoke without fire thing that is sort of generally attaches itself to people in public life. I can remember, for example, these are these awful, awful rumors that went round about Leon Britton and I would never indulge them because I saw no evidence whatsoever. And I just thought, well, this is just a sort of smear. Whereas I think the stories with Rab have been so frequent, so common. And of course, you have to remember, you know, I know quite a lot of people at various levels of the civil service.

3:35And, you know, they don't normally, very, most civil servants you've told, they try to be quite nice about their ministers. And I think you just kept hearing it again and again, he's incredibly difficult, he's very unpleasant, he's very intimidating, he's quite a nasty personality. And that's what sort of made me think, well, the problem is a bit of fire with the smoke. And I think this is an important moment actually for Rishi Sunat because if you remember professionalism, integrity and accountability and all that, I suspect he was hoping that the process would clear ra, but it hasn't ra, upset he'd resign and he's gone.

4:12But I don't think you can have a government delivering properly on its objectives unless you have got a well -motivated public service behind you. And the real damage of this is that there is, I think, a real sort of disjunction at the moment between the government. And I don't think this is political. The Tories will like to say this because the civil service is full of lefties and et cetera. And it's just not. Then I don't think anybody should fairly define them like that. But I think that you have to have them properly motivated. And I've said to you before that I was routinely called a bully in the media.

4:49But I'm very proud of the fact that not a single civil servant ever came forward and as it were justified or supported that claim. Because I think this is about how you treat people. It's about your basic attitudes to other human beings. whether you think they're there to be little and intimidated or whether you think they're there to try to help you as part of your team. And I'm all in favor of Rob when the Tolley, the King's Council, saying that he was demanding, he was in cosyterial, he wanted high quality of work, he should expect that, I agree with that. But then the question is, how do you get people to work like that for you?

5:25And I think good ministers will always be able to do that. And so I think, really soon, that needs to use this for a reset with these relations with the civil service. So let me just get to the details of what's come out so far from the Toli report. So this is toli quoted. He said, Ms. Rob was interviewed four times over the space for around two and a half days and engaged seriously and conscientiously in the process. In the conclusions, he said, on a number of occasions at meetings with policy officials, the DPM, whose Rob acted in a manner which was intimidating. in the sense of going further than was necessary or appropriate in delivering critical feedback and also insulting in the sense of making unconstructive critical comments about the quality of work done, whether or not it was a matter of substance, any criticism was justified, and then he gives some examples.

6:16By way of example, he complained about the absence of what he referred to as basic information or the basics. So I think we imagine he said something like you just haven't given me the basic information you haven't done the basics here. Complained about obstructiveness on the part of officials whom he perceived to be resistant to his policies and described some of the work as utterly useless and woeful. And then he goes on to say the DPM did not intend by the conduct described to upset upset or humiliate. Nor did he target anyone for specific type of treatment. So he's saying that it wasn't that Rob was harassing individuals and particularly not individuals on the basis of their characteristics.

7:00He seemed to be like this in general. It doesn't seem to be personally directed. But he then goes on to say, his interruptive style is not itself behavior that could be regarded as intimidating or insulting. However, individuals who previously experienced the DPM express and unconstructed criticism of their work might reasonably have interpreted a series of interruptions as a form of implicit criticism. I mean, it's also important to understand in thinking about this, that Dominic Rab, who actually, I was quite fond of in the House of Commons, and I saw quite a lot of, but he's quite an introverted figure.

7:37He's somebody who spends a lot of time in the gym. He was an Oxford boxing blue. So he's physically quite big and intimidating and he has a manner, I think people remember when I was in the leadership debates against him found just the way that he stands on the podium and speaks, that he's quite aggressive. I think one of my few encounters I've had with him was in a TV studio on the night of, I think it was the 2017 general election and there were a few people who were in a studio that had been sort of impacted in the same place or hang around this green room. And they were probably a half a dozen people in there, you know, people that you'd just know from across the political spectrum.

8:22And I have a vivid memory of him sitting down in a chair in the corner and literally just sitting there looking at the other people as opposed to engaging with them. And I think, and I remember the time thinking, was he just a bit sort of, you know, isolated and a bit introverted as you say and I think he probably is. But that thing about physicality is very very important in politics. You know, there we were in Belfast the other day, you see Bill Clinton making a speech and you know he's tall and he's elegant and he uses his hands and his body well. That's a kind of these are important characteristics but I think it's every picture I ever see on the television or in the papers, a Robert Dominic Rob getting out of a car for example, he always has this look on his face if he just wants to go and head button the nearest person.

9:07And again that could be introversion, it could be just him having a sort of a shell around himself of which he's not not conscious. But I think if you read I've not had time yet to read the full report, I've I've skimmed it. But you have a sense of somebody who may be unaware of the way that he comes across. But you also get this sense that repeatedly he's demotivating rather than motivating, undermining rather than building up. And these to me are just very, very poor leadership in team building qualities, which you need in a minister. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Also, I think of the change that we've seen in British political life.

9:45We were in Ireland, as you said earlier this week, and I was thinking about Roy Mason, who was the classic Labour Northern Ireland section in the late 1970s, kind of real unionist bruiser, who people at the time sort of admired for being kind of tough and outspoken and challenging and demanding. And I think we are more conscious now than we were in the past of the impact that can have on people, how incredibly unpleasant it can be to work in an environment in which you feel that you're being undermined. And of course, one time What it did isn't illegal, bullying is not against the law. I think another thing that I often think about is that you can have a pretty unpleasant time with a boss.

10:28I think people find this with some of the big Silicon Valley start -up culture without them necessarily saying anything that you can quite catch them out on, but they create a general atmosphere of people feeling generally inadequate overwhelm. No, the question I guess is, how does one get the balance right on this? Because it's also true that the civil service can be pretty slow moving, and have very firm views on what it wants to do, and it can take very, very strong personalities and leadership to get any change going. Yeah, my experience of the civil service, like every other organization, there are good and there are average and there are bad, and there are some truly exceptional.

11:13Again, back to Northern Ireland, there were some really exceptional civil servants involved throughout that process, truly exceptional people. Others bit slow, bit difficult, but you know, not just not maybe on the same wavelength as those of us who were trying to get things moving. But I think that in general, civil servant, I don't know what your experience was, but in general civil servants, if you're clear with them, if you genuinely listen to them, And I think what sometimes happens with people like Rob maybe, and I think this goes across other ministers in this government, is that when civil servants are doing their job, which is actually to speak truth to the power, and is to give proper analysis of ideas that are being put forward, particularly with a government that sort of tends towards populism, that can be taken by the ministers, you're criticizing the policy, you don't want this to work.

12:05Now I'd be very surprised if there are that many people inside the civil service who think is a great idea to be shipping migrants off to Rwanda. I doubt there are many civil servants who think it's a great idea to be dragging us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which a former Conservative government was part of taking us in. But they would get on and do it if they were given clear instructions in a reasonable way and asked to analyse the realities of the promise. It's weird. I mean, so you can't ask me what my experience was. And I think there is a difference between your experience when you were right there next to the Prime Minister at number 10 and the experience of being a minister even as Secretary of State.

12:44I did frequently find and I love the civil servants and I was the civil servant myself but if I was going to be more sympathetic towards some of the frustrations that Dominic Robin counted, I did find times when people were deliberately blocking me and it took me a long time to understand why. There's often very good reasons why they're doing it. So let me give you a couple of examples. I was asked whether or not we should be spending 75 million on training the Afghan police. And I said absolutely not. I don't know much about the world, but I do know quite a lot about Afghanistan. And we've spent a lot of money training the Afghan police and it's a complete waste of money.

13:25No, we will not spend that money. And I then found myself in a battle that went on for months where the ambassador would go around behind my back to the National Security Council and I'd have to go and speak to the home section, the foreign section to win again, then people would go around, civil servants would go around my back again to the Prime Minister and I'd have to speak to the Prime Minister directly. Is it not possible that there was a minister that was pushing that against you rather than just the civil service? That could have been civil servants from another department who were doing their ministers bidding.

13:54That's sometimes the case. In this case, what had actually happened, I think, is that the Ambassador had made a promise which he probably shouldn't have made to the UN system that the money was going to be delivered before they asked my permission. And in a way, part of the problem in the relationship to humanist civil servants is getting the honesty to get him confident enough to say, yeah, I'm really sorry. I screwed up. I made the promise before I asked you, would you mind letting this one go? And I probably would have been fine. But often I had another one with Yemen. The Diffid came in to say to me, I said, we're spending $200 million in Yemen.

14:28How do you know what's happening? We don't have anyone on the ground. And they said, well, we do Skype calls with Yemenis. So I said, well, I'd love to see one of these Skype calls with Yemenis and they all went white. And then I said, look, I don't want to bully you, but come back in four weeks time, show me a Skype call with Yemeni. And in four weeks time, senior civil servants came back and said, Minister, why do you want to see this Skype call with the Yemeni? And I said, look, I can explain why I think if we're spending $200 million on the ground, we need to have some information. But more fundamentally, I think told you to do it.

14:58Just do it, right? I don't care. Just set up a Skype call. Roy, did you swear at the Civil Servant? I may have done. I may have done. And I think this is another thing. Don't you, apparently there was no evidence that Dominique Rob Swaw. I swear a lot, but I swear nicely. Well, you see, there we are. So in that case, I think what had happened is a junior civil servant, probably a bit intimidated, had made the mistake of saying they were doing Skype calls with the Yemenis and they weren't and they just couldn't admit it. So I learnt through this, the reason I want to be a bit sympathetic is that I was actually called out by my permanent secretary who said, took me aside very nicely and said, where are you going to have to be a bit careful with your language here, particularly with junior civil servants, because I was interrupting and a lot of that is frustration.

15:40You're desperately trying to drive stuff through the system. You tell people to do stuff months past, nothing happens. And often you're right, there is a context. Some of the ministers blocking it, number 10's blocking it. Somebody says wrongly, but you don't see that. What you see is a stomach rubs. It feels like obstructiveness. It feels like people are just not doing what you've asked them to do. There's a reason why civil servants are not necessarily people with high profiles. Because they don't particularly want a high profile. Whereas politicians inevitably do. they know that having a high profile is being part of being a senior leading politician.

16:17And so the frustrations I used to see the most with the civil service were actually generally with civil servants that we weren't necessarily seeing. In other words, for example, I can think of lots of occasions when we were preparing for prime minister's questions. When Tony, who was always desperate to get facts, he always wanted facts before he kind of decided what the answer was going to be and sometimes just getting very basic factual information out of the civil servants was harder than we felt that it should have been. Now I didn't know that was a course of concealing, I think it was just a sort of old fashioned outmoded systems that we were that we were trying to change.

16:54And then on policy, I you know he did and I don't think he was the first prime minister, he did often complain about the home office for example as feeling that there was a there was a kind of culture within the home office that felt it knew more about crime and criminal justice than politicians who were out on the sharp end of it and of all the time. But I think the culture that you have that you try to develop is what's the key to this. And I think that the problem with this government, this isn't just Dominic Rab, I think that through the whole austerity period, there's just been a general undermining of public service.

17:28And I think that's a terrible mistake. I think you have to motivate people to work for you. And I'll see you. I think there's a couple of other interesting points to make here. The first is that this is Rishi Sunak who's meant to be the kind of grown up, different to Truss, different to Johnson. This is now the third member of a cabinet that he's lost already. Williamson for bullying, Sahari over his tax situation, and the other thing, I'm going to ask you a little quiz question here where it's quite an easy one, but I want to ask me, what do these people have in common. Hen Clark, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Listros, David Liddington, David Gork, Robert Buckland, Dominic Rob, Brendan Lewis, and now I'm going to give it away and now Alex Chalk.

18:10Well, they are all, uh, sexually sustained for justice. In a decade. No, it's, it's crazy. And it was true when I was a prison minister and it's one of the fundamental problems in British government. These reshuffles are completely the out of control. You know, junior minister, ministerial defense, moving every year, prison minister's moving every year. This is at a time, you take the justice brief. You and I both know from the work that we do with on the prison's front, prisons are in a state of crisis. The probation service in a state of crisis, the court system is in a state of crisis, policing is in a state of crisis, and dominate Rob, the justice secretary, who's done the job twice now, by the way.

18:47He's, I think you can count it 11 if you can him twice around. Yet, But these things are, I'm not saying they're not being addressed, but they're not getting the political input and drive that they should be because this guy's been focused on all this stuff. Alright, wait, let's take a quick break.

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21:30Welcome back to the RESTAS Politics Emergency Podcast with Mirorys Yert. and me honest to Campbell. Very pleased, very pleased with Alex Chorke's promotion. So he's somebody who I knew very well, very thoughtful, quite quiet, somebody who was horrified by Boris Johnson, very close to the remainside. He worked with me closely with Ken Clark when we were trying to get Theresa May's deal through. He's somebody who I feel has been very, very unfairly overlooked for eight years, and I'm really pleased to see that he's coming. So he's a lawyer, he did the prison's brief well, so I'm really pleased to see Alex Chalk back in and I think that's another sign of Some thoughtful serious people that I admire.

22:16Is another Orange Bridge private schoolboy in the cabinet? That's true. Damien Hines who I think isn't a private schoolboy is also a very good prison minister So we sometimes talk about and he to be fair, you know, was in the cabinet was Secretary of State for Education the cabinet took the demotion down to be the prison minister and then did have done a very good job at a more junior level. Oliver Dowden, Deputy Prime Minister, would you think of that? I'm less of an Oliver Dowden fan because he was a very early endorsement of Boris Johnson against me. I've always liked you chippantly held that against him.

22:50Whereas Alex Chalk very sweetly supported me for the leadership. You cannot judge everything according to their relations with or support for opposition to you. What's your analysis of Oliver Doudon, political skills? He was David Cameron's deputy chief staff. He was very much liked by Cameron. He came out of Downing Street into politics 2015. He was seen as a liberal Cameroon. I think what was troubling for me is that he moved so quickly to become one of Boris Johnson's cabinet ministers and endorse that whole catastrophe. But then he resigned as chairman of the Conservative Party, and he tripped the downfall of Johnson because it was Dowdons resignation.

23:34You remember, we did a podcast about that, which led to those 52 Ministers eventually resigning. So bringing down Johnson. So he needs some credit for that. I was a bit troubled also when he was culture minister that he was slightly getting into the cultural crisis. He's actually a state schoolboy, but desperately wants to sound like a private schoolboy. I find that very strange anyone. Also, just on our latest show, he's got an absolutely minuscule majority, hasn't he, over the liberal demo? And in Chelten, I think he's in three figures. I mean, he was a difficulty to take against Lib Dems. You'll see also on YouTube an extraordinary scene outside his constituency office during the Brexit debates where he goes out and addresses a huge crowd.

24:14It's a lovely, lovely moment of prophecy. Oh, yeah, I remember that. I remember that, yeah. We've got some questions, so maybe this is the thing to wrap on. Question from Holman, does a resignation leave the door open for Rob to return at some point and would have sacking have closed it and James Larry why does a misdemeanor of this nation estate necessitate resigning from the cabinet and not from Parliament is a lower ethical bar to be a constituency MP? Well I think I said a few weeks ago I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for Keir Starmer to have a policy that the principles of the ministerial code should be adopted by Parliament for all MPs.

24:50you know, honesty, accountability, objectivity, selflessness, integrity, all that stuff in the Ministry of Accordination, and some of the details. So, you know, bullying and intimidation, there are lots of complaints within the House of Commons, from House of Commons stuff, about bullying and intimidation by MPs who aren't ministers. And famously, your friend John Berker got in real trouble for that. I mean, that's what really destroyed John Berker's career. Yeah. And also, you know, opposition MPs as well, you know, not everybody's as sane. Labour and the Lib Dems are saying that Sunak is weak, that he should have sacked him rather than wait for him to absorb his own report.

25:25The bits about natural justice that I didn't like last night was the fact that the people who had made the complaint, so did not see the report before the government and Rob were able to read it and then comment on it publicly. I thought that was a bit much. As to whether he comes back and look, look at Suello Bravaman. I mean, she was reappointed to the cabinet very short time after being sacked by Rishi soon that, not sacked by soon that, but a pointed by soon that. So therefore, I think it probably does leave the door open, but I think it would be a very, very big mistake. Yeah, some people don't come back.

25:56I mean, Matt Hancock, for example, didn't come back. And I think he hoped that he resigned and he hoped that Boris Johnson bring back and that never happened. But it is happening more and more frequently. I mean, you know, Gavin Williamson, Pretty Patel, all these people who were fired from previous people's cabinets did eventually come back. It's odd because if you go back to the big scandals, the 60s, people like Profume, a resignation was very final. People didn't usually come back from resignations. David Miliband on the podcast last week talked about the age and impunity. We are really living in an era where shame is not in massive quantity.