Dominic Raab, who quit as Britain’s deputy prime minister on Friday, is both victim and beneficiary of his unusual industry. He benefits because, long before his ministerial career was interrupted by allegations of harassment, his administrative record would surely have stopped him elsewhere. Raab attributed the public servants’ reaction to him for the “pace, standards and challenge” he brought to the post, but his ministerial career lacks fulfillment. At the time of his second appointment as Justice Secretary, he had nothing on his CV to recommend that he be given another ministerial position.
Still, if his chosen career was anything other than being a politician, he surely wouldn’t have lost his job as an attorney general the way he did. To be found by an independent report to have, on occasion, interrupted people by “extending one’s hand directly to another person’s face” is, by any measure, unnecessarily rude. But in any normal workplace, a quiet word in the ear of whoever raises their hand and a mild apology would surely suffice.
Raab is not the first politician to be plagued by rumors about his conduct. The last Labor prime minister, Gordon Brown, was accused of throwing pens and even a stapler at staff. In April 2009, Bloomberg reported that an assistant had been warned to beware of “flying Nokias”. The Prime Minister’s spokesman at the time described the Bloomberg report as “the kind of baseless, unsourced nonsense you’d expect to read in the Sunday papers, not about so-called respectable financial services. “. The difference, of course, is that some of the allegations against Raab have been confirmed by an independent KC.
In 2020, the presidential candidacy of Amy Klobuchar, senior senator from Minnesota, was hit by a series of bullying allegations. She has been accused of routinely reducing staff to tears and reprimanding them via email. One of her former staff members, Tristan Brown, defended her, telling the Huffington Post, “I’ve heard people say she’s hard to work with and I sometimes cringe when I hear that because that I rarely hear that said about male bosses in Congress despite the fact that it’s hard to work for half of Congress” – a line that is obviously not a denial of the allegations themselves.
What binds Raab, Brown and Klobuchar is that their chosen profession – that of elected official – is not normal and neither is their place of work.
Political parties and parliamentary offices are high-pressure environments filled with bosses with limited managerial experience and junior staff directly linked to the will of their boss.
While none of these characteristics are unique to the world of politics, taken together they can create particularly dysfunctional workplaces. The Raab case illustrates them all well: while the crisis at the CBI shows how many of the same problems can strike organizations that are not faced with the unique circumstances or pressures of politics.
The problems date back to Raab’s original appointment. Like Klobuchar, Brown, and essentially every politician who took office before them, Raab’s primary qualification for high office was his ability to win elections. He was promoted by successive prime ministers largely because of his political credentials as a committed Brexiter from the party right. What he and most politicians lack is management experience. Politics is far from the only industry where people are rewarded for their expertise in a field with management responsibilities, and left to sink or swim. It’s a recurring problem for many businesses, especially journalism. In recent years, this has been a particular challenge for tech companies where, through periods of rapid growth and expansion, people have been promoted to leadership positions at an incredible speed.
But an important difference between politics and other industries is that there is no internal pressure to improve the management skills of individual politicians. Governments and legislatures face constant pressure not only to cut costs, but also a constant backdrop of hostility from the press and their opponents to any expense that looks like a benefit.
The same thing that sees ministers crammed like sardines into second-class carriages and that has resulted in more than a decade of real pay cuts for parliamentary aides and civil servants, means there is little chance that elected politicians receive good management training.
Even if it was offered, there is no one who can really get them to take it. An overlooked subplot of Adam Tolley’s report on Raab’s conduct was that Antonia Romeo, the Justice Department’s permanent secretary, approached him to change his behavior. (Raab disputes this account, although Tolley accepted it as true, in part because of the depth of Romeo’s contemporary notes.) When undertaking management training, politics will always be cursed by inexperienced and poor managers .
If that weren’t enough, the unusual structure of the political workplace makes it even more prone to dysfunction. Most people in politics, whether they’re councilors or working in a parliamentary office, are tied directly to the will of their boss in a way that’s rare outside of the most messianic start-ups. They tend to share a political vision and a set of goals. It’s a workplace where people are used to going the extra mile and the tolerance for bad bosses is incredibly high. Almost everyone is either at the very top of the organizational tree – be it a minister, an MP heading his parliamentary office or the prime minister – or in a largely flat structure. A problem in the CBI too is that it is an organization with a “missing middle”: many relatively junior employees flanked by a handful of powerful senior bosses are always a source of trouble.
What makes the toxicity of politics more likely to spill out is, in part, that politicians come into conflict with each other, but also because successful politicians are forced into contact with a organization that actually functions as a modern workplace: the government bureaucracy. This is where an intimidating or charismatic politician may find they don’t have what it takes to run a ministry. It’s no coincidence that many politicians’ careers falter once they enter government: or that Raab’s career ended because of his behavior towards public officials.
The hard truth for politicians, their direct employees, and anyone who comes into contact with them is that these characteristics are not easily removed from politics. If there is never an excuse for intimidation, if success in elections entails the obligation to be good at management, the state in question would no longer be called a liberal democracy. For the rest of us, politics remains a useful case study in how not to run a workplace, and probably always will.
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