LONDON: Dominic Raab has announced he is stepping down as UK deputy prime minister after being faulted in a workplace bullying inq­uiry, dealing a fresh blow to the beleaguered Conser­vatives.

The resignation presents a headache for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who had pledged a fresh start after his predecessors’ turbulent tenures, some two weeks before local elections at which the Tories are expected to lose seats.

Sunak is also battling to claw back a chasm of lost ground to the main opposition Labour party before a general election next year.

Raab, who stood in for ex-PM Boris Johnson as he battled Covid in 2020, had promised to quit if any claims against him were upheld. In his resignation letter, Raab called the findings against him “flawed” and “set a dangerous precedent for the conduct of good government”. The bar for bullying was set so low, he said, that “it will encourage spurious complaints against ministers and have a chilling effect on those driving change”.

Oliver Dowden to replace Dominic Raab

The report’s author Adam Tolley said Raab “acted in a way which was intimidating” at a meeting while foreign secretary and by threatening a civil servant with “unspecified disciplinary action”. At the justice ministry, he was at times “abrasive” but not “abusive”, Tolley added.

Although he was cleared of all but two of the eight allegations against him, he blasted the conclusions of a lawyer-led inquiry laun­ched in November. In a lengthy riposte in the Daily Telegraph,he des­cribed the six-month investigation as “Kafkaesque” and a trial by media “fue­lled by warped and fabricated accounts”.

Justice secretary

Raab also resigned from his post as justice secretary, where he has notably had to battle a backlog in criminal cases caused by years of under-funding and disruptions caused by the pandemic. He previously served as Brexit minister and foreign secretary but was moved from that post after being criticised for failing to return from holiday as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

Sunak, who succeeded the short-lived Liz Truss in October last year, vowed to restore “integrity, professionalism and accountability” in government after Johnson’s rollercoaster tenure.

The prime minister said he accepted his resignation “with great sadness”, praising his record in government and for promising to resign if any of the complaints were upheld.

Meanwhile, the British government named Oliver Dowden, who currently serves as cabinet office minister in Sunak’s government, as deputy prime minister. He was previously chairman of Sunak’s Conservative Party but resigned from that post last June after two crushing by-election defeats for the party.

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner accused Sunak of weakness, for not sacking Raab before he quit. Sunak previously sacked Nadhim Zahawi as Conservative party chairman over his tax affairs. Gavin Williamson, a former defence secretary who kept a tarantula on his desk while in charge of party discipline in parliament, quit over expletive-laden messages.

Former lawyer Raab, a karate black belt, has denied bullying civil servants working for him during his time at the Brexit ministry, foreign office and Ministry of Justice. He rejected allegations of an overbearing manner with colleagues, insisting that ministers “must be able to exercise direct oversight with respect to senior officials over critical negotiations conducted on behalf of the British people”.

Not to do so, he said, would mean loss of “the democratic and constitutional principle of ministerial responsibility”.

Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2023