How the Blob Destroys its Opponents

In a hidden valley high in the Himalayas (or is it the Andes?) there exists a reclusive sect of monks whose sacred duty is to list the many ways in which British conservatives have been naïve.

Day and night these monks labour at their scrolls; each is inducted into the order at the age of seven years old and will work until his death. They have been at this task for many generations; the trouble is that the list grows endlessly, and no matter how hard the monks try, they simply can’t keep up with events. Indeed, there are those among their number who surmise that there is literally no end to their mission, since there is simply no limit to the foolish good faith and complacency of the Tory Party and its fellow travellers.

One of the items on the monks’ list, recorded in April 2023, is the constructive ousting from office (technically, he resigned) of Dominic Raab, then Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Justice. This might sound like ancient history – indeed, you may have forgotten all about it, if you even knew about it in the first place – and is a pretty recherché topic for foreign readers. But the event is worth studying in some detail, because of what it tells us about how the British Civil Service ‘Blob’ functions when it detects the presence of an unwanted interloper, and what this likely signals for a future reforming (I use the lower-case ‘r’ advisedly) Right-wing government.

First, then, a little background. The British Civil Service is a permanent bureaucracy which is supposed to be politically neutral and to simply implement what government ministers want to be done. It is notionally headed by the Prime Minister, who is by convention also always the Minister for the Civil Service and therefore in charge of hiring and firing. This arrangement was only made formal in 1968, but before then Prime Ministers would make what alterations to the Civil Service they deemed appropriate by Orders in Council, exercising the royal prerogative. As in many things, the British can therefore be thought of as having taken a much more ‘small c’ conservative path at a certain fork in the road compared to our American cousins. Whereas in the US the President essentially appoints a Civil Service on taking office, a UK Prime Minister could do so but instead, by custom, arrives to take charge of a pre-existing, 500,000 strong horde of winged monkeys in Whitehall.

Ideally, he then commands these winged monkeys to ‘Fly, my pretties!’ and they carry out the will of the British people with, if this doesn’t mix the metaphor too much, Rolls Royce efficiency and competence. But of course this is not what happens in practice. This is for three reasons.

The first is that civil servants are almost all university graduates, and to be a university graduate in 2025, especially if one has graduated at the top end, is to have certain biases that it is perhaps unfair to label entirely Left-wing or ‘woke’, but certainly can be labelled technocratic and internationalist. Civil servants are therefore simply predisposed to like some policies and drag their feet on others (restrictions on immigration and anything Brexit-related being good examples of the latter).

The second is that literally all senior civil servants are permanent employees of the state, and the thing about employees of the state is that – funnily enough – they don’t tend to like the state to get smaller. The ‘advice’ that civil servants provide to ministers in any given circumstance is therefore always going to have an inherent bias towards state intervention at the margins, and there will, again, be foot-dragging when it comes to attempts to move the state in a more minimalist direction.

And the third is the inevitable excessive caution and inertia in respect of change that will set in amongst any group of people who do not really have skin in the game and which is evident in public sector bureaucracies everywhere – even Tony Blair complained about how “frankly unresponsive” the Civil Service is to politicians desiring to effect reform. People with jobs for life and a nice pension waiting for them in retirement resist reform not out of laziness or lack of discipline, but because they are human beings and human beings who are comfortable are simply not oriented favourably towards change. Why on earth would they be?

What a Prime Minister encounters when he takes office, then, is not an army of Rolls Royce-driving winged monkeys waiting to simply carry out his orders on the basis of his having been elected by the British people, who are sovereign. No: it is a group of human beings who have been educated a certain way, have certain incentives and biases, and behave accordingly.

We all of us know the type. They are well-off, did well at school, went to Russell Group universities and go to dinner parties. They read the New Statesman, the Economist and Private Eye, and listen to that thing with Rory Stewart and the man who allegedly lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction. They worry about how many steps they do each day, know what their 5k personal bests are and have opinions about ‘Strictly’. They have conversations about charging points for EVs and pretend to be interested in the Tour de France. They do Dry January and have favourite brands of non-alcoholic beer. They know what an ‘otrovert’ is. They regret the fact that they used to read books but no longer have the time. They use Bumble to find partners. They try not to eat carbs. They awkwardly drop their h’s and final t’s when confronted with a working class person. They grew up in homes with Agas. They pretend they are too cool to shop at M&S or John Lewis but care passionately about both. They think that Stewart Lee is a biting and profoundly talented satirist. They have lists of phoneybaloney hobbies curated to make themselves sound more interesting than they really are, like wild swimming and capoeira. And they have the opinions and ideas which necessarily follow from all of these predicates.

It is not their fault, bless them; it is who they are – that is their tribe, and their tribe simply believes certain things as articles of faith. But it poses great difficulties for any minister in charge of a Civil Service Department whose personal values clash with those articles of faith. And this is the position that Dominic Raab apparently found himself in on several occasions during his ministerial career – as a Brexit-supporting Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, then as a patriotic Foreign Secretary, and then as a Minister of Justice bent on trying to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 in part to make deportation of foreign criminals easier. That he had also during his career said that he was “probably not a feminist” and that he was concerned about the effect of immigration on house prices, of course, did not help matters. This is a man, then, steeped in heresy and toxicity who was always going to encounter disapproval from his underlings.

On November 15th 2022 a string of complaints about Raab suddenly surfaced from various civil servants he was then working with in the Ministry of Justice (MOJ). By sheer coincidence, on the same day, a complaint was also made about his conduct at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (during the period 2019-2021), and soon after, on November 23rd, another complaint was made from somebody who had worked under Raab in the Department for Exiting the European Union (during the period June-November 2018). Five more complaints were then made between November 25th and December 13th 2022 from within the MOJ. Raab quickly requested that the complaints be investigated independently. And the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, appointed Adam Tolley KC, a silk with, by all accounts, encyclopedic knowledge of employment law, to conduct that investigation – the results of which were supposed to then inform Sunak’s decision about whether Raab should be sacked.

I leave you to make up your own mind, for the time being, whether there was anything fishy about the fact that all of these allegations against Raab came out in such quick succession. Tolley certainly was of the view that there was “no sign of collusion” between most, though not all, of the complainants. I will come back to that issue, however. Let’s for the time being, though, focus on the substance of the complaints, which was that Raab was a ‘bully’, and how they were dealt with in Tolley’s report.

The first thing to say about the report is that Raab comes across as precisely the sort of person you would want to be in charge of a band of winged monkeys in a Civil Service Department. Here is an excerpt from Tolley’s description of his working style:

The DPM [Deputy Prime Minister] is highly intelligent, pays close attention to detail and seeks to make decisions based on evidence. He has strong principles and is guided by them in practice. He works assiduously and typically from about 0730 until about 2200, Monday to Thursday. This includes working during the car journey to Westminster and from Westminster to home. Fridays are allocated to constituency work. He usually does extensive work on weekends also. He makes a determined effort to use his working time effectively. He seeks to use meetings with policy officials in order to test the relevant material and make a decision.

Sounds like a rotter, doesn’t he? The report goes on:

The DPM is… inquisitorial, direct, impatient and fastidious. … He tends to prepare extensively for meetings, will typically have read all of the key papers and identified questions in advance. … [He seeks] to ensure that responsibility for the performance of any task is allocated to a suitable, identified individual. He will then operate on the basis that the individual is accountable.

Fancy that! But at the same time, we learn, the DPM “often encounters what he genuinely sees as frustrations in respect of the quality of work done, its speed of production and the extent to which it implements his policy decisions”. If work is not done to his satisfaction he will “say so”. If somebody gives him a longwinded or waffly answer to a question he will “likely interrupt”. And once he has made a policy decision he does not like it to be “revisited subsequently by civil servants”.

It is hard to know what there is to dislike about this – I don’t think it is the only managerial style in existence, though it sounds like an effective one – but it nonetheless gave rise to the complaints in question. And one really does have to work hard at this juncture to remind oneself that one is not talking about ordinary people at all here – but rather extremely privileged people who have likely never had a blue collar job and have spent their lives being told how clever they are.

The nature of the complaints is laughable, and on reading them it is impossible for me not to reflect on how my various bosses used to talk to me in various roles when I was a teenager and university student. There was the Milanese cafe owner whose favourite mode of interaction with his minions when they displeased him was yelling “va fanculo, testa di cazzo!” (trans: “take it up the nether regions, you person with a penis head”) at us while making obscene gestures I will not describe. There was the cake factory owner who used to make a group of us stand next to an industrial freezer arranging mince pies in parallel rows as they streamed past on a conveyor belt for hours on end while our eyebrows and eyelashes turned rigid with ice and our extremities began to ache redly with incipient frostbite – all to ‘reduce waste’ by making sure one pie in a hundred did not fall off on its journey to refrigeration. He used to patrol past every so often, cast a critical eye over our handiwork, and say things like, “I thought this was all you fuckers would ever be useful for, but now I’m not even sure of that!” There was the head chef who once told me to “get that dead fucking rat off your chin” when I turned up to work after a week’s holiday sporting a goatee beard of which I was immensely proud. There was the nightclub manager who used to point her finger in the faces of her employees and loudly announce “You’re pissing me off” if they made the slightest error.

I say this not out of approval, you understand; this is certainly not how I comport myself in a leadership role, or ever would. But I was perfectly willing to take it on the chin as an employee – and often, of course, I saw the funny side. And, like almost anybody else who works in that type of setting, I also recognised that kind of behaviour as a natural way to let off steam in a high-pressure environment. I would even go so far as to say that it actually sometimes (though only sometimes) raised, rather than lowered, morale, because it reminded us that there was something at stake and we were not just going to work to mess around and flirt – livelihoods were on the line and doing a good job really mattered to the business itself.

But people who work in the Civil Service don’t appear to be made of particularly stern stuff – in Whitehall, it seems, feelings get rather easily hurt. Tolley’s report in general reads as something more like the product of a group counselling session than a proper investigation by a KC. One has to imagine the winged monkeys sitting around on bean bags explaining in great detail how the wicked witch made them feel. The result is something that to any fair-minded observer living in the normal world is, frankly, preposterous.

The first preposterous thing about the report is that, for all that it was carried out by a KC, it functioned as something more like anti-law than law itself. Almost every element of the rule of law as classically understood was not just ignored but turned on its head. Raab was not permitted to know who his accusers were – and in fact their very anonymity was lauded as itself somehow virtuous; the complainants throughout are described by Tolley for their “bravery” and “courage” – as though making anonymous complaints about somebody behind their back is not just about the most cowardly thing it is conceivable for a human being to do. Raab was required to defend conduct that in some cases (as when he was Brexit Secretary) had allegedly happened over four years earlier and had no specific content other than a vague accusation of “abrasiveness”. He was accused of conduct – “bullying” – which has no legal definition and is therefore impossible to disprove. In part, Tolley’s investigation covered allegations made by people who did not actually participate or agree to be interviewed. I could go on.

The second preposterous thing about it is its utter triviality. This is familiar to anybody who studies what goes on in the Employment Tribunal – essentially in most cases a juridified form of gossip – and it is worth bearing in mind that Tolley is an employment law expert. We are told that Raab never shouted or swore, did not use aggressive hand gestures, was not abusive and was not vindictive. His conduct in other words did not even meet the threshold of what would be a completely normal level of assertiveness seen through the eyes of an ordinary human being.

But at that level Tolley – while not identifying any specific action or statement to speak of – was able to conclude that Raab once (yes, once) was “unreasonably and persistently aggressive in the context of a workplace meeting” during his time as Foreign Secretary, and that he had “referred to the Civil Service Code” (which forms part of the contract of employment between civil servant and Crown) in a way which “could reasonably have been understood as suggesting that those involved had acted in breach of it”. While at the MOJ, Raab apparently once had a meeting with a policy official and criticised him or her for failing to meet a deadline without requesting an extension – and this was “humiliating and upsetting” for that individual. Raab, Tolley informs the reader, likes to “use the time in a meeting in as focused and effective a manner as possible” and will not therefore “sit passively” while people repeat themselves or go around the houses – and his “frequent interrupting” may “have a cumulative effect as a form of intimidating or insulting behaviour”. He once or twice accused people of not grasping “the basics”, and so on. This is the kind of behaviour which apparently merited the intervention of a KC and which was enough to get Raab dismissed.

And the third preposterous thing about the report is the picture it paints of civil servants in government departments. These are the people who are at the coalface, running the country. But Raab’s behaviour – remember, not shouting or swearing; not using aggressive hand gestures; not being vindictive; not being abusive; yet apparently being in some vague sense “abrasive” – was enough to give them “stress and anxiety”, to force them to take “special unpaid leave” or “stress-related sick leave”, to inflict “significant negative impacts” on their “psychological well-being”, and so forth. What emerges is a singularly unimpressive and dismal picture of what these people are really like and what they are capable of. And what is made abundantly clear is an attitude of, essentially, naked self-centredness on their part. We are told, for example, in a highly revealing sentence, that:

It appears to me [i.e., Tolley] that the DPM was so focused on achieving his desired outcomes, in what he genuinely believed to be the public interest, that there were occasions when he did not take into account, fully or at all, his likely effect on some other [people].

That is, feelings trump the public interest: what apparently matters most to Civil Servants is their own “psychological well-being” interpreted in the pettiest and most fragile of terms, rather than achieving what the minister in charge wishes to achieve. The DPM was focused on achieving his desired outcomes in what he believed to be the public interest, but he did in such a way as to hurt the delicate feelings of a winged monkey or two, and the latter of those things is the more important.

This is, in short, both pathetic in its substance and appalling in its implications. It suggests the existence of a Civil Service which is simply ill-equipped to take seriously what is needed to actually govern a country, comprising people so emotionally fragile they cannot tolerate being interrupted or reminded of the importance of keeping to deadlines. That in itself would be worth studying and remarking on. But what is far worse is that, for all of Tolley’s protestations to the contrary, the take-down of Raab was clearly the result of a determined conspiracy to eliminate him from senior office.

The clues here are partly in the timeline. No complaints about Raab were made during his time in the Brexit Department (2018) or Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (2019-2021); complaints from those departments only emerged after the original complaints from within the MOJ (November 2022). It is quite a stretch to imagine in particular that after the MOJ complaints somebody in the Brexit Department was able to suddenly recall events that may or may not have taken place in 2018 with sufficient clarity to make a fresh complaint ab initio – at best this has to be characterised as bandwagon-jumping, but it is much more realistic to imagine shenanigans behind the scenes in WhatsApp groups which Tolley would not have been privy to.

And this is, I think, almost confirmed by Tolley’s own account of what went on in the MOJ when the complaints of late 2022 were made. Here, we are told that these complaints were “prepared by a group of… policy officials” and “signed collectively” and was the “product of discussions within an informal network of civil servants whose number is uncertain”. And if this was not alarming enough – it certainly screams ‘conspiracy’ to me – Tolley then went on to let us know (bear in mind that this is buried on page 37 of the report) that “only some of those individuals had any direct experience of the DPM [!]”, that “some had never met him at all [!]” and that these people were just “seeking to support their colleagues”.

He later goes on to make clear that he thought there had been “some discussion and cooperation” between “certain relevant individuals”, although implausibly he concluded that there was not “any sense in which they attempted to tailor their evidence to fit with any other person’s”. And he eventually came to the view that it was impossible to take any of the complaints from within the MOJ very seriously, because – to reprint the report itself (emphasis mine):

(1) It was the product of discussions, involving a large number of individuals, over an extended period in February and March 2022.

(2) It was drafted by ‘committee’, with multiple contributors.

(3) It is focused only to a limited extent on the DPM himself, with references also to ministers (plural) and other civil servants.

(4) It uses the language of a “perverse [sic; I think they wanted to say ‘pervasive’] culture of fear” without a clear explanation of what it is said to mean. I received different explanations from different individuals.

(5) It refers to a significant extent to material in relation to effects on colleagues about which none of the interviewees in respect of the MoJ Group Complaint knew anything specific.

(6) It made allegations about unreasonable work deadlines which were not persuasively instantiated by any witness.

That sounds pretty conspiratorial to me, and, I would submit, to any fair-minded reader. And that it was evidently a pretty cack-handed one and that it did not pull the wool over Tolley’s eyes does nothing to take away from what surely ought to have been the inevitable result. This is that since the MOJ complaints “paved the way” (in Tolley’s own words) for the other complaints from the other departments to be made, the whole edifice was founded on piffle and should have been allowed to simply collapse like the tower of sand that it was.

In summary, in other words, all Tolley had to go on after discounting the MOJ complaints was a very dubious and vague set of recollections of certain “abrasive” behaviours from years ago that he could not really confirm and which no sensible person would describe as being “bullying”. And the kicker was that he even accepted the evidence, provided by almost literally everybody interviewed, to the effect that after the complaints had been made Raab had behaved perfectly well and had made efforts to recalibrate his approach. The conclusion of the report is incredibly mealy-mouthed:

The DPM’s conduct was sometimes ‘abrasive’, in the sense of a personal style which is or feels intimidating or insulting to the individual, but is not intended to be so. His conduct was not… ’abusive’ in the sense of behaviour which is intended and specifically targeted. … Since the investigation was announced there has not been any valid ground for criticisms of [his] conduct.

Yet, on that basis, Raab was still required to resign by Sunak. What can possibly be said about this?

The first thing brings us back to the subject we began with: naivety. If there has been one overarching problem afflicting Tory politicians since 1997 it has been their failure to understand or accept that they will never be loved. They have cringed about their ‘nasty party’ image; they have genuflected; they have apologised; they have done all of the right climate-changey, minimum-wagey, NHSey, immigrationy type things. They have done all of this desperately hoping that the cool kids will like them. And they have succeeded only in being both despicable and contemptuous rather than merely despicable. The electorate will never like the Tory Party; it never elects a Tory government out of affection, but only ever because it gets the job done. And Sunak’s message to the Civil Service should therefore have been crystal clear: ‘If you think Dominic Raab has done something unlawful or has acted in such a way as to breach your contract of employment, then you should pursue the proper avenues to obtain a remedy. But if that is not the case, he is getting the job done and has my full support.’ He did not do this because he wanted to look nice. He did not understand that the Tory Party should never look nice.

The second thing, relatedly, is the precedent that has now been set. The Civil Service ‘Blob’ got an important scalp in Dominic Raab. He was a pugnacious reformer who would, if he had been successful, have almost single-handedly revamped human rights law in the UK. I happen to think there was a lot wrong with his Bill of Rights Bill, but there was also a lot that was good about it, and it would have been greatly preferable to what we have now. Yet he was the victim of a conspiracy to take him out. That might not explicitly have been an attempt from within the MOJ to put the kibosh on human rights reform specifically – it may simply have been that the civil servants in question didn’t like Raab because he was on the Right of the Tory Party and that was enough to want to expunge him like so much effluence. But it is as clear as day, reading Tolley’s report, that his removal was deliberate and coordinated. This should have been perfectly evident to Rishi Sunak, and, again, in elbowing Raab out he was demonstrating extreme naivety. He was sending very strong green light signals, for future reference, to civil servants faced with reform-minded politicians on the Right, and either did not understood that he was doing so, or did not appreciate its consequences.

The third thing is that, taken together, all of this should greatly concern politicians of both the Conservative and Reform parties with a General Election looming much closer than the official deadline of 2029. The Civil Service is apparently staffed by at least a significant minority of people who will find such politicians intrinsically ‘abrasive’ and who will weaponise their own psychological frailty in order to try to get those politicians removed. The task facing a reform-minded government of this stripe is monumental in itself, but having to achieve it in the teeth of this type of opposition from its secretariat will make it infinitely more difficult. The question then becomes: what to do about it?

Here, the case for reform of the employment conditions of civil servants, and indeed a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to the relationship between employment law and government becomes irresistible. Theresa May, in 2018, afflicted with the same desperate desire to be liked as Rishi Sunak, had written a foreword in the Ministerial Code, which reads in part as follows:

Parliament and Whitehall are special places in our democracy, but they are also places of work too [sic], and exactly the same standards and norms should govern them as govern any other workplace.

We have to ask ourselves whether this is really true. Why should exactly the same standards and norms apply in Whitehall as do in the local Co-op, in a primary school or at Nissan Motors? It is not that those workplaces are unimportant. But the Civil Service is, along with the military and the police, the active arm of the executive – it is what carries out the will of the government, which in turn is formed from the elected representatives of the people, who are sovereign. Is this not qualitatively rather different to “any other workplace”, and therefore to be operated along rather more robust lines in terms of what is expected of its employees? Do we want perhaps, for example, to consider paying these people more in return for an expectation of higher standards and fewer workplace protections? Do we not want them to be as dedicated and hard-working as Dominic Raab is portrayed as being in Tolley’s report? And are we not a serious country (don’t laugh) with expectations that the public interest should trump the “psychological well-being” of those who pull the levers of the state?

These are the types of questions which, along with many, many other things, have been naively overlooked for a generation, and they will have to be answered by anybody hoping to form a successful future government on the Right of British politics.

Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.