Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Raab?

On benevolent bullies

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can get you fired. Word such as “Dominic Raab is a bully”. At first there seems little point in debating whether or not such words are true. It is highly unlikely that either the reader or writer have witnessed the alleged abusive behaviour first-hand. (Though it is curious that in the panopticonic buildings of Whitehall, no damning or absolving recordings have come to light). But even if the public were able to observe the altercations in question, like that optical illusion which can be seen as both a beautiful woman and an old hag, where some would see malice, others would perceive stern and exacting leadership.

Like most things nowadays, the commentariat’s views of the affair have fallen along all too predictable tribal lines. Yet another weary battle in the ongoing culture wars. From Brexit, to Trump, to Covid. The political disputes of the last decade have often been variations on the theme of Roundheads vs Cavaliers. One side championing profligacy, adventure, and a swashbuckling joie de vis, the other, parsimony, stability, sobriety. Think May vs Johnson, Clinton vs Trump, Elon Musk vs Elon Musk.

However, in the case of differing attitudes toward Raab, rather than English history, a more apt allusion can be found in Greek Mythology. To the right we have the legions of Ares, god of war and courage. To the left, the soldiers of Soteria, goddess of safety and protection. Let battle commence!

Are you the type who aspires to be a sort of Nietzschean ubermensch? One who invites hardship for its fortifying qualities, and values stoicism and self-determination? Is your alma mater the school of hard knocks, where the fees are paid in blood, sweat, and toil rather than government backed hand-outs that your grandchildren will ultimately end up repaying? If that describes you, then you will take up arms for Ares and see Raab’s resignation as a the latest flurry in the snowflakisation of society.

If however, you regard people as budding roses, who are best able to reach their potential through loving support and nurture, then you side with Soteria and consider the icy stares that Raab cast upon his underperforming underlings as nothing but a killing frost.

There is a clear gendered dimension to a person’s allegiance in the Ares-Soteria war. Indeed, Mrs Ape was adamant that intimidation and making people feel uncomfortable is never justified (except of course as a tactic towards me, where she readily employs cold stares, swearing, and projectile warfare, but enough about my wedding night). However, you don’t need to take my sexist domestic ramblings at face value, we also have all the authority of a scientific empirical analysis into the matter.

A 2023 analysis of the extensive PISA 2018 dataset involving over half a million students across 77 countries,  found that girls were much more likely than boys to hold anti-bullying attitudes, reinforcing the same findings of earlier research (Marsh et al., 2011; Rigby and Slee, 1991; Salmivalli & Voeten, 2004). It is not merely the case that boys have a different definition of bullying than girls, but that they hold a different opinion on the virtues of bullying itself.

Although by no means exclusively, men tend to lean Arean in their outlook on life. I’m sure I’m not the only male who on hearing about Raab’s capacity to castigate his staff, felt a newly kindled desire to work for him. There is something in the male ethos that compels men to seek out things that attempt to destroy them. This can be witnessed in the difference between male and female small talk. Whereas females are likely to engage in mutual affirmation and empathising, the chief aim of much male banter is to assassinate one another’s character. The motivation for such caustic discourse is to test the man’s capacity to confront the potential annihilations that await him throughout his life.

This is also why males are far more likely to engage in pastimes which test their capacity for survival, such as combat sports, white water rafting, and forgetting their wife’s birthday. Even in relaxation, rather than the rejuvenating revelries preferred by women, such as spa treatments and brunch, men indulge in further forms of self-destruction, from the reverse dragon like practice of inhaling noxious smoke by breathing through sticks that are on fire, to the chemical burn felt as a result of imbibing liquids that are more poison than tonic.

As David Byrne sang in the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime”;

My chest is aching, burns like a furnace,
The burning keeps me alive.

For men, life is always taking place during wartime, which often results in us exuding the gravitas of a domesticated cat who thinks he is still a tiger prowling the jungle.

Indeed one of the perks of being a man is that even the most mundane tasks can take on the gravity of Caesarean like manoeuvres in a Bismarckian war game. Whilst Mrs Ape’s retail excursions are leisurely, anfractuous soirees around the shops, mine are calculated, efficient sorties, where the objective is to extract only the required items in the minimum amount of time before retreating back to the compound asap.

Against this perceived backdrop of perennial warfare, the male capacity for recreational self-annihilation is a way of communing with the impending jeopardy of life, like two opposing generals meeting to share a conciliatory brandy on the evening before they attempt to destroy one another on the battlefield.

If this is how males organise their recreation, what should we expect from them in matters of vocation?

I recall Stephen Fry discussing his relationship with the late Cantonese-English entrepreneur Sir David Tang. Fry was appalled at the abusive way in which Tang addressed his driver for the most trivial of oversights, often in terms not fit to be reproduced in this article. More shocking than Tang’s rudeness, however, was the utter reverence and respect that the driver held for him, who he described thusly; “Wonderful man. Wonderful man. I love him.”. Similar seemingly paradoxical employee attitudes towards their bosses have been reported for several high status leaders, such as Winston Churchill, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs.

What separates an inspiring but tough leader from a bully in these cases is the competence of the boss (in the same way that it is attractiveness which distinguishes the behaviour of a Don Juan from a creep). However, the acidic behaviour of a superior is also alkalised by the compassion and Pygmalion like esteem they held towards their employees. Though his staff often commented on the fear they felt towards Jobs, many describe in glowing terms how they couldn’t have achieve what they had in life without the entrepreneur’s sincere belief in them. Regarding Tang, if you had as much as broken your arm, or been on holiday for 3 weeks, he would throw an honorary dinner in your favour.

Now I know what many of you are thinking? This is a classic manipulative tactic employed by bullies. Beating you down, until you are too tender and vulnerable to defend yourself, only so they can build you up according to their own whims. Yes, that is exactly what it is! Many men want to be broken down so that the weak, flabby, fawning aspects of their being are exposed. This is a necessary step in the construction of a better self.

For a man, his self-worth is largely determined by his resilience to attempted destruction. As a result, men will often seek out other men who can act as benevolent agents of nature’s severity. The closer to the brutishness of nature the man wishes to go, the more severe a teacher he will tolerate if not desire.

As such, there is a hierarchy of acceptable abuse that depends on context. If your desired realm of operation is the low stakes world of municipal gardening, then the style of leadership is expected to be equally pastoral. If, however, you wish to deal with the weighty matters of state, with the fate of millions directly tied to your performance, where your adversaries are among the most cunning and ambitious people on the planet, well then you better hope your Sensei is not shielding you. It is interesting to note that the literal meaning of the word Sensei in Japanese is “future, reality”. The idea being that a good teacher exposes you to what you will face in the future in their absence.

In the benevolent bully, we have a figure who knows the inherent brutality of the world, and who like Batman has become the thing he fears as a means to conquer it. Rather than vindictiveness, it is the hard fairness of high expectations that leads him to expose you to this brutality in measured doses, not to diminish you but to build you up.

Conversely, there is a cloying unease one feels when coddled in an environment that is too supportive and safe. Like taking a warm bath when there’s a fire in the kitchen, or only being taught how to swim in the shallow end of the local pool, when you know you will be out at sea the following week.

However, what separates a trial by fire from being burnt at the stake is a path to graduation conferred by the “bully”, and the sine qua non that the bully is as hard, if not harder on themselves then they are on their team and had managed to overcome such adversity with a record of past performance to prove it.

The evolutionary antecedents to such behaviours are easy to appreciate. It was predominantly men who left the safety of the camp, in search of food. Facing threats of predators, the elements, and rival tribes. In contrast, it was the responsibility of women to provide a safe, and salubrious home to return too, one which would support the development of the hopelessly vulnerable offspring.

Although, it is important (if not tedious) to note that the differences between men and women aren’t completely binary. There is considerable overlap between the sexes, with the bell curves and bell curvettes co-mingling like 1950s teenagers drawn from opposite walls of the dance hall.

Moreover, this isn’t to say that the fairer sex doesn’t have its own unique exposure to the brutality of nature. In truth, the tortuous process of childbirth brings the female of the species into intimate contact with the limits of human resilience. Perhaps this explains why women are less impressed by the male propensity to indulge in needless strife. Once you have forced a human body through a satsuma sized hole in your private parts, do you really have anything more to prove in the resilience department? I ran this theory past Mrs Ape, who dismissed it as a rather male way of thinking about childbirth, though albeit one shared by Mr Kipling as the below verse from his poem “The Female of the Species” describes;

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast

May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.

These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—

She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

One wonders what Mrs Kipling thought.

You may well consider the preceding tract on the male propensity for punishment to be a romanticisation not relevant to the context of a government minister’s interaction with his civil servants. After all, the team of civil servants serving Raab were a mix of both men and women, and people tend to become government bureaucrats in search of stability rather than adventure and conquest.

However, perhaps the contrary cultures of ministers and bureaucrats contains a clue as to why Raab perceived his behaviour as suitable whereas his officials did not.

First it is worth considering Raab’s situation using fittingly military vernacular:

The operative: Raab an ambitious, tall, robust figure, with just the right type of receding hairline to imply the optimum mix of testosterone and youthful vigour. The son of a Jewish immigrant who fled the Nazi’s during WW2 at age six, Raab won a place at a competitive grammar school, allowing him to enrol at Oxford where he captained the university’s Karate Team. After graduation he joined the high pressure magic circle law firm Linklaters, expected to work 13 hour days, before becoming a lawyer for the civil service (of all places) where he worked on prosecuting war criminals at the Hauge.

The environment: The Palace of Westminster, an imposing Gothic structure, replete with artefacts and designs that sing of its gravitas and grandeur. It’s grounds are adorned with numerous statues reminding you that you are walking in the hallowed footsteps of great, epoch altering figures from Thatcher to Churchill, Disraeli to Richard the Lion Heart.

The mission.: A mandate from the sovereign will of the people to negotiate the nation’s successful extraction from the EU, whose opposing objective is to ensure that you fail, employing every underhanded tactic at their disposal. In the event that you fail your mandate, you can expect to receive little mercy or quarter.

Your allies: A group of officials who in their hearts disagree with the will of the people and side with the very EU that opposes you, and who you suspect are seeking to frustrate you in your appointed task.

Returning to Byrne in Life During War Time:

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco

This ain’t no fooling around

No time for dancing, or lovey-dovey

I ain’t got time for that now

Now let’s consider the context of the civil service (military metaphors not required). It is about continuity and it doesn’t have a dog in any government fight. Rather, its sole purpose is stability. It is a safe harbour against the lunacy of the political tides which sweep in and out of office with great sound and fury. The pay is low (a recent advert for head of cyber security at the Treasury conferred a paltry salary of £57,000), but it is commensurate with the risk. The job is not just recession proof, but anti-fragile, in that any attempted to attack the service ultimately engenders the creation of more bureaucrats. As the civil servant Primus inter pares Sir Humphrey Appleby riposted when asked to find ways of reducing the size of government in the comedic ministerial training video series “Yes Minister”. His instinctive, almost Newtonian response was to instruct an exhaustive enquiry into the matter, which would require the hiring of scores of new civil servants to conduct.

Given the non-overlapping magisteria of ministerial and bureaucratic milieu, is it any wonder that ministers and servants clash on what behaviour is appropriate?

Now please don’t misunderstand my argument. It is not my intent to portray Raab as an effective leader or adept manager of people, rather to adjudicate whether or not he is a “bully” and by whose standards the notion of a “bully” should be defined.

The Oxford English dictionary defines a bully as someone who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable. The word “seeks” implying intent rather than consequence, whilst “Habitually” suggests that this intent is held for its own sake, rather than as means to an end.

Therefore, the pertinent question to ask is, was Raab attempting to habitually harm and intimidate those he perceived as vulnerable for the sake of it, or was his behaviour (however coarse an unproductive) meant as a means to achieve an end? Do we also hold that, Raab was soft on himself, expecting his staff to compensate for his shortcomings, and chastising them when they failed to do so?

Of course, it is possible that a particularly intelligent bully could use the pretence of high standards as a means to justify and obscure their abuse. However, a more parsimonious interpretation is that Raab was treating others how he was himself treated during his career, and which it seems had worked out rather well for him.

Luckily we have all the authority of an independent report to a shed light onto the matter.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-report-to-the-prime-minister

The investigation into Raab’s behaviour remarked on the high standard he held himself to. Building upon his Linklater training, Raab worked 15+ hour days, always during his commute, and often on weekends. It also affirmed that the frustration Raab felt with the poor performance of his staff was genuine and that it was this rather than malice which stoked his ire.

The report also found that Raab did not hold vendettas against staff, and that he would “wipe the slate clean”, with a stern criticism of an official in one instance not tarnishing them with a black mark in another. Where Raab was at a fault however, was in not appreciating that officials tarnished themselves with imaginary black marks, and it was this which had a deleterious impact on their mental health and job performance. As Seneca wrote, ‘we suffer more in imagination than reality’, a dictum that one imagines Raab is more familiar with than the civil servants. Importantly, the investigation exonerated Raab from accusations of swearing, shouting, and the use of office paraphernalia as artillery.

Yet despite all this, the conclusion of the report was that Raab had displayed bullying behaviour, which consequently led to his resignation. At first this outcome seems in contradiction to the actual content of the report, until you realise it isn’t if you simply change the definition of what a bully is.

The alleged actual “bullying” behaviour is isolated to two instances in 2019 during Raab’s Tenure at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Again, holding a genuine view of subpar performance at the output of his civil servants, Raab acted in a manner which one servile servant felt was intimidating and that Raab should have been aware of this effect. It also found on a separate but closely related occasion toward the same individual, that although Raab did not threaten them with punitive action, he sincerely intimated that they had breached the Civil Service code. This intimation by Raab, led to the official feeling distress at the thought they were in breach of contract, and thus would be vulnerable to more formal punitive action. From Seneca to Twain, 'I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.'

One should be cautious of superfluous language, and the discourse around the Raab bullying saga has been replete with its use. The lived experience of the civil servants. The social justice of not letting those with power abuse those without. Such tautologies often serve to obscure the fact that the concepts have taken on the reverse meaning of what was originally intended.

In the high court of social justice, the role of the judge and jury is not to discern objective truth, but to amplify and authorise the claims of the accuser. In this world view, perpetrators are not just responsible for their own actions, but for the manner in which others react to their actions. It is a world in which the notion of agency is not examined, both in the sense that the agency of the accused is not relevant to the claims of the accuser, and that the accuser is robbed of the expectation that they have any agency in re-defining their lived experience. Lived experience becomes a euphemism for imagined reality.

Raab has not been accused of preventing the professional progression of any officials or subordinates. Rather the accusers claim that his behaviour caused people to undermine this themselves.

Saying that a person in power is responsible for how they make you feel, implicitly states that how you feel is a result of that person and not yourself. It extends that person’s power from the external professional to the internal psychological realm. The person in power has a responsibility for your mental state, where as you don’t.

The effect is not one of empowering the victim to become resilient, but of indulging their vulnerability. It is a Soterian philosophy, which in seeking to protect ultimately causes harm. Interestingly, though the Roman’s had an equivalent god to Ares in Mars, they did not have one for Soteria. The closest match is Salus, though her domain was more that of health and rejuvenation than protection and shelter. It is where the word 'salubrious' is derived from.

You may well argue that Raab should have possessed the acumen and savvy to moderate his behaviour to be more aligned with the expectations of the civil service and the modern workplace, rather than the raucous pit of rancour that is the House of Commons chamber. (Though it is worth mentioning that the official investigation highlighted that not once did anyone inform him that his behaviour was perceived as “bullying”). However, this is an argument for insensitive leadership rather than bullying.

In truth, Raab is a Martian, expecting to lead other Martians into battle. Instead he was given a shoal of Soterians. And somewhat ironically the Soterians have won the war. Now, it is not my intention to portray Soterianism as having no value. Like most things in life, it is important to have a balance between opposite forces. However, in the laudable attempt to compensate for the over Areanism of the past, the pendulum has swung too far from Mars. It is only by extending a Soterian olive branch towards the Areans, that a productive harmony of contrasts can be achieved. We should seek to accommodate not assassinate the Areans amongst us and within ourselves.

We have a similar dynamic at home. My wife is often bemused by my propensity to seek out adversity and the accompanying inability to enjoy respite when it is available. This is why she books the holidays and I quixotically volunteer to captain the rental car. (There are few tests of one steel greater than that of taking the reins of an opposite-hand drive car with a manual gearbox on foreign roads where the speed limit is a suggested minimum). However, our latest jaunt to a sun-soaked Greek island in the summer may not happen as, due to delays in the civil service, it is likely my son’s passport will not be renewed in time. I dare say the lackadaisical apparatchiks at the passport office would rather deal with Mr Raab than a Mrs Ape in danger of being denied her holiday.

Marsh, H.W., Guo, J., Parker, P.D. et al. (2023).Peer Victimization: an Integrative Review and Cross-National Test of a Tripartite Model. Educ Psychol Rev 35, 46

Marsh, H. W., Nagengast, B., Morin, A. J. S., Parada, R. H., Craven, R. G., & Hamilton, L. R. (2011). Construct validity of the multidimensional structure of bullying and victimization: An application of exploratory structural equation modeling. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(3), 701-732. https:/doi.org/10.1037/a0024122

Rigby, K., & Slee, P. T. (1991). Bullying among Australian school children: Reported behavior and attitudes toward victims. The Journal of Social Psychology, 131(5), 615–627

Salmivalli, C. and M. Voeten (2004). Connections between attitudes, group norms, and behaviour in bullying situations. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 28, 246-258, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01650250344000488