FOR months, anonymous Whitehall whistleblowers have taken to the airwaves to accuse Dominic Raab of everything from “hard staring” and “microaggressions” towards staff to shouting and swearing.
Here, a former senior official who worked for the ex-Justice Secretary delivers their own damning verdict on a failing Civil Service — and insists we need more ministers prepared to tell Whitehall that its work is not good enough.
I’m one of the senior Ministry of Justice officials who worked with Dominic Raab.
My team had made a basic error which had embarrassed him and I was called into his office to explain how and why it had happened.
He was icy to the point of being rude, abrupt, and I left feeling about nine inches tall. And I totally deserved it.
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That’s the thing about government. It matters.
The Ministry of Justice was and is a failing department, where senior staff enjoy comfortable salaries and the best views in London while around them the justice system falls into bits.
Rapists are left at liberty, people are stuck in abusive marriages because they cannot get a court date for their divorce and prisons are festering, filthy factories of crime.
Some of this is down to money. But a lot of it is bad management.
When you have delightful views over St James’s Park from your corner office in a tower block — if you bother to come into the office, that is — things somehow don’t feel so bad.
Maybe Mr Raab’s methods were not the right ones to get the Ministry to start actually doing its job better.
But spare me the self-pity from civil servants with no experience of life outside the public sector.
Put it this way, when Dom was horrid to me it was mild compared to b*****kings I saw handed out in private industry or the Army.
There’s a bigger point too. This isn’t the first time that officials look to have done-in a minister.
We saw it at the Home Office when Amber Rudd was forced out after officials lied to her and she had to carry the can.
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Somehow it always seems to be departments that are most badly failing where civil servants have their feelings hurt the most.
The Home Office certainly falls into that category.
Everyone agrees that civil servants should have the right to blow the whistle if they come across wrongdoing, despite what it explicitly says in the management handbook about not talking to the Press.
But these days it always seems to be about their own hurt feelings rather than scandals involving the waste of public money or outright wrongdoing.
No Ministry of Justice official has ever gone to a reporter to confirm what everyone inside 102 Petty France knows — that a sizeable proportion of staff working in prisons are on the take and that is how the vast bulk of drugs and phones get into jails.
Doing that would upset the cosy relationship they have with staff unions.
If senior civil servants briefed reporters about government policy as energetically as they do about supposed bullying then ministers would get a much better press.
No official has publicly taken the blame for the fact that the Civil Service allowed one of the people it placed in Mr Raab’s office to moonlight as a callgirl.
In the end, the relationship between the Civil Service and ministers is about trust.
Good ministers have to be able to trust that officials are at least trying to deliver the verdict of voters and not constantly updating their plans to go to an industrial tribunal.
Ranting and raving rarely gets the best out of people.
But when the stakes are as high as they are at the top of government, perhaps ministers should be able to tell people that their work isn’t good enough.
That’s what the people who pay their wages would expect.
