'Is Dominic Raab a tyrant or not? That's all you need to know'

Justice Secretary, Prime Minister and Civil Service may never agree if Dominic Raab is a bully, says Fleet Street Fox. But how it bounces will tell us all we need to know

"Nobody read the report!" This one or the other!

It took a lawyer 6 months to interview witnesses and produce a report on whether or not Justice Secretary Dominic Raab is a bully.

The report, which apparently comes to no conclusion but merely lays out the evidence, was today handed over to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who will now decide whether or not to fire his best friend in politics.< /p>

We may never know the whole truth, but here's one thing you can bet on: Lawyers speak extremely slowly, in order to match their points to billable hours, but even a KC can't lose 6 months unless there's a lot of meat on that bone.

Oo is a good boys haunt? (

Picture:

Getty Images/iStockphoto)

We know two things about allegations: there are a lot of them, and some seem remarkably petty.

24 officials from the 3 departments headed by Raab are believed to have complained, and witnesses to the alleged incidents include key permanent secretaries and at least one prime minister.

The accusations range from Raab as being "demeaning", "aggressive", "seething" and "a freak" who created a "culture of fear" and led staff to resign and have suicidal thoughts, to reports of "long silences", throwing tomatoes in a bag, and being "dry" or "abrasive".

Many people - including yours truly - have been accused of being reckless, too violent, of not singing Kum-By-Yah enough with their colleagues. But you'd be hard pressed to find 24 people all complaining about one person doing the same thing, especially on the kind of small teams that occupy the upper echelons of government.

And there's a good reason for that.