A former civil service mandarin has revealed he had to warn Dominic Raab “more than once” about his conduct as foreign secretary while they were working together.
Simon McDonald said Raab, who was forced to quit as deputy prime minister on Friday after an inquiry found he had bullied civil 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, Lord McDonald claimed, adding: “He disputed it. He disputed the characterisation.”
McDonald, who was permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office between 2015 and 2020, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Frankly, I witnessed somebody whose methods did not help him to achieve what he wanted to do, and that I raised with him more than once.”
The high threshold for filing a formal complaint against ministers meant that civil servants were hesitant about reporting specific grievances, he said, which, without evidence, Raab “was able to deflect”.
“He said, and in a way reasonably: ‘What is the evidence?’ And without being able to present names and particular detailed instances, he resisted my representations,” McDonald said.
Rejecting Raab’s claims of “activist civil servants”, who the former prime minister claimed on Friday were trying to block the government’s work, McDonald said all civil servants 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 added.
But allies rallied around the former foreign secretary. Hugo Swire claimed Westminster had not seen the end of Raab, predicting that he would be “back in some capacity”.
“This is a career which has been brought prematurely to a temporary halt, because I fundamentally believe that a talent such as Dominic will reappear in some place at some time. It is the government’s loss,” Swire said.
Overnight reports claim a Brexit-era row over British troops in Gibraltar was behind one of the bullying claims.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the civil servant at the centre of the incident was the British ambassador to Spain, Hugh Elliott, who Raab allies claimed went beyond the cabinet position on not having Spanish officers permanently stationed in the British overseas territory.
In an article for the newspaper, Raab claimed the inquiry into his behaviour was “Kafkaesque”. In a BBC interview, he accused “very activist civil servants” of working against him and claimed ministers would be fearful of officials as a result.
Bob Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, on Saturday described Raab’s activism claims as “absurd”. He told Today: “It’s completely inaccurate, and I think it’s just one more line of attack to avoid taking responsibility for his actions.”
Attacking Raab’s “graceless” resignation letter, he added: “He seems to lash out at everybody but doesn’t accept personal responsibility for any of his own behaviour, and I think the issue here he’s trying to turn it into – some kind of constitutional question of good government – simply doesn’t stand up.”
The general secretary of the FDA, the trade union for civil servants, accused Raab of setting a “dangerous” precedent by accusing civil servants of acting on political grounds, and he called on Rishi Sunak to intervene.
“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,’” Dave Penman told Times Radio.
“Of course he provides no evidence to support that whatsoever in his desperate attempt to defend himself.”
Penman accused ministers of trying, without evidence, to stoke a culture war of a “woke left civil service”, who were not able to respond due to impartiality rules.
He called on Sunak to “conduct a review of the entire process” of how civil servants report concerns about ministers.
