DOMINIC Raab did not need to resign over allegations of bullying, according to former Brexit minister Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The MP told GB News: “Well, I don’t think that Dominic Raab needed to resign. I don’t think the report found he’d done anything improper.
“And the issue in relation to the Foreign Office that seems to be the real cause of his resignation is one where civil servants were behaving badly in relation to Gibraltar and you would have thought any minister would be annoyed when civil servants failed to carry out the policy of the elected government.
“I’m afraid this is a terrible shift in power away from those who are democratically elected, democratically appointed, to those who aren’t, to the civil service, to the bureaucracy. It’s a great mistake that Dominic Raab has been forced out.”
In an interview with Emily Carver, he continued: “If you look at the report, it’s quite clear that a group within the justice ministry did get together to decide that they would say how awful Dominic Raab had been, but that was quite clearly something that had a number of conversations behind it.
“They weren’t spontaneous complaints. And this seems to me to be disreputable and something that should have been dismissed much more harshly by the investigator than it was.
“I found a mix with civil servants. I found some who were very good and very hardworking and others who didn’t share the ambition of the Government.”
He added: “These are high pressure roles and people working for the Deputy Prime Minister aren’t on the teddy bears’ picnic, they must expect it to be a tough and robust working environment.
“It’s obviously ridiculous to think that it’s going to be anything other than that when you’re running the country and decisions have to be made very rapidly and high standards are expected. Dominic Raab sometimes said that wasn’t good enough.
“Now, you must be entitled to say that as a minister, and there was a lot of fuss about him saying that civil servants should pay attention to the civil service code. Now, whether he said that or not is a matter of dispute, but actually it seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing.
“To say, particularly when in this specific instance over Gibraltar, it looks as if the Civil Service was ignoring the democratically elected government’s policy, which of course under the civil service code they’re not allowed to do.
“You need to have people with a bit of backbone working in the government and this snowflakery is damaging for democracy.”
