A British ambassador was at the centre of one of the bullying complaints upheld against former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab, it has been reported.
Mr Raab resigned from the cabinet on Friday, following the conclusion of an investigation into multiple allegations against him.
Adam Tolley KC, the senior lawyer who led the probe, concluded the MP for Esher and Walton behaved in an “intimidating" and aggressive” way towards officials.
Mr Raab faced eight formal complaints in total, spanning the three different government departments he was previously in charge of, two of which were upheld.
One of those involved Britain’s ambassador to Spain Hugh Elliott, according to The Daily Telegraph.
Mr Raab’s allies claim that in 2020, the then-foreign secretary was told Mr Elliott may have secretly proposed putting Spanish soldiers on the ground in Gibraltar during Brexit talks.
Historic tensions between Gibraltar - a British Overseas Territory which Spain has claimed sovereignty over since losing it in 1713 - came to the surface in 2020 as the UK prepared to leave the EU. The two countries had been wrangling over who would police the border between Spain and Gibraltar, a rocky outcrop off southern Spain.
Whatever the proposed solution, the UK government’s position at the time was that Spanish soldiers should not be permanently stationed on the border.
But Mr Raab’s allies told the Telegraph Mr Elliott went beyond Britain’s position by sounding out a “fudged” solution with officials in Spain.
The ambassador is said to have been told to return to London for a meeting with Mr Raab and was replaced in negotiations. Neither the details of the meeting, nor Mr Elliott’s account of them, have been made public.
But the report into Mr Raab’s behaviour does refer to a Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office complaint, and is highly critical of the deputy prime minister’s handling of the matter.
“In reaching and implementing this management choice he [Mr Raab] acted in a way which was intimidating, in the sense of unreasonably and persistently aggressive conduct in the context of a work meeting,” the report states. “It also involved an abuse or misuse of power in a way that undermines or humiliates .
“He introduced an unwarranted punitive element. His conduct was experienced as undermining or humiliating by the affected individual, which was inevitable.”
The Foreign Office has been contacted for comment.
Mr Raab, a boxing enthusiast and karate black belt, went down fighting as he left the government following a phone call with Rishi Sunak.
He criticised the inquiry as “Kafkaesque” and suggested civil servants had tried to force him out of office.
Mr Raab also claimed that the nation will “pay the price” if the threshold for bullying in government has been lowered.
The former deputy PM complained that the report into his conduct did not make clear that no complaints lodged by junior officials were upheld.
In an interview with the BBC following his resignation, Mr Raab claimed that a small group of “very activist” senior civil servants had pushed back against proposed government reforms because they didn’t support them.
Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA Union which represents civil servants, said Mr Raab had set a “dangerous” precedent by accusing officials involved in his bullying investigation of acting on political grounds, and called on Mr Sunak to “intervene”.
“He was happy for a KC - who was Adam Tolley - to investigate, he just doesn’t like the result, and now he’s desperately trying to rescue his reputation, including (through) his spurious allegations about civil servants,” Mr Penman told Times Radio.
“This is where we start to get into quite dangerous territory and really the prime minister should be starting to intervene, because what Raab’s now doing is he’s saying: ‘this wasn’t just about me, this was a politically motivated group of civil servants trying to block government policy’.
“Of course he provides no evidence to support that whatsoever in his desperate attempt to defend himself.”
Mr Raab’s departure sparked a mini-reshuffle, with Alex Chalk, a former junior minister for the Ministry of Defence, replacing him as justice secretary, and Oliver Dowden as deputy prime minister.
