Bullying revealed in British history – shocking findings of bombshell report

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers

Some of the leading figures in British history have been found guilty of bullying behaviour and being stern with colleagues.

A hitherto unseen bombshell report – drafted by the highest power in the land, someone from HR – delves deep into the nation’s past and lays bare a shocking catalogue of hurt feelings, misunderstandings, violence, threats of invasion and breaches of the HR code. 

Campaigners (loosely defined) are demanding resignations and apologies.

What are the findings?

Winston Churchill

The charge list is long against the former wartime Prime Minister, spanning thousands of complaints that run from 1874 (the year of his birth) to 1965 (the year of his death). Thousands of complaints of “mockery”, “sarcasm” and “Churchill staying up late drinking and expecting everyone to listen to his stories” have been uncovered.

Investigators decided to restrict their enquiries to one narrow aspect of this bullying and coercive conduct, namely Churchill’s treatment of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, later Lord Alanbrooke.

Alanbrooke himself faces a long list of charges that include “making subordinates fearful he (Brooke) would be displeased with poor work”, “being blunt during the military evacuation from France in May 1940”, “criticising colleagues”, “sporting a moustache” and “looking stern and unwelcoming walking down Whitehall in his uniform.”

Defenders of Alanbrooke point out that he had a lot on his plate. On numerous occasions Churchill suggested wildly inappropriate military schemes designed to defeat Hitler, and Alanbrooke had to explain repeatedly why they were impractical. Even though Alanbrooke and his colleagues generated many of the ideas that resulted in Allied victory, Churchill tried to take most of the credit for their ideas in his memoirs. Alanbrooke got his revenge, publishing his own war diaries containing criticisms of Churchill and others.

Investigators concluded that both Churchill and Alanbrooke suffered from hurt feelings. Churchill dealt with this by continuing his lifelong regime of self-medication.

To cope with the wartime stress of dealing with Churchill, and trying to defeat the Nazis, Alanbrooke fell back on birdwatching (he was a leading ornothologist) and spending time with his family.

Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke declined to cooperate with the inquiry, threatening to fetch his shotgun when investigators called at the family residence.

The report recommends the establishment of a separate rolling public inquiry into Churchill and Alanbrooke, lasting for a decade or two, staffed by leading HR experts and lawyers paid by the hour.

Queen Elizabeth I

The charge is that Her Majesty did speak sharply to members of her privy council and at one point threaten to have several of them executed if they did not stop badgering her about marriage and religion. The Queen has insisted she has nothing to apologise for and meant every word of it. She acknowledged that sometimes she might have been joking, about executions for example, though she claimed unpredictability was a key component of her leadership style. It could be hard to tell when she was being serious and when she was joking, she admitted.

In particular, the authors of the report zero in on the hurt feelings of Sir Thomas Gresham, pioneering financier and founder of the Royal Exchange. The great bourse, or financial market place, established in the heart of the City of London should have been named after its founder, Sir Thomas. Instead, the Queen liked it so much that she insisted it be called the Royal Exchange, leading to Sir Thomas feeling upset although he dare not say so. 

Despite everything he had done for her from the first day of her reign, when he rode at high speed to Hatfield to get in on the commercial action, or as he put it to pledge allegiance to the young monarch, the Queen made him feel edgy and stressed for several decades. Eventually he died.

Sir Thomas had even agreed to house Mary Grey – Elizabeth I’s rightful heir – at his home in the City, when she was put under house arrest by Elizabeth for marrying without the Queen’s permission. Mary was held there for several years and was locked in her room when the Queen visited the Greshams for dinner on the 23rd January 1571. The French ambassador wrote an account of the evening.

Mary’s husband Thomas Keyes was held in the dreaded Fleet prison, where he sustained a lot more than hurt feelings. Mary Grey never saw him again.

The Queen told investigators that Gresham was “a loyal and true friend throughout my reign, but also a man of the City always on the make and in need of being brought down a peg or two.” Complaint rejected, though the report recommends that Queen Elizabeth I seek behavioural  training and work on her empathy.

James Callaghan

Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had his feelings hurt by Prime Minister James Callaghan during the IMF negotiations of 1976 and in the aftermath, investigators discovered.

With Britain almost bust and in an inflationary spiral, the Labour government sought an emergency loan from the IMF. The Tories in 1972 had engineered a disastrous expansionary boom that then went bust when the oil crisis hit in 1973.

Investigators have established, by reading the memoirs of Lord Donoughue, who was there as a young adviser, that on one occasion a grumpy Callaghan was in bed in the Number 10 flat, suffering from a cold and avoiding relatives who had come to stay in London. The PM and Healey then had a dispute on the telephone about an aspect of the terms and what the IMF had asked for on guarantees. Callaghan asked Healey for the precise terms and numbers. Healey could not provide the information because he did not have it in front of him. Callaghan, to gain the upper hand over the Chancellor, claimed to have the piece of paper in front of him. This was false. Callaghan did not have the piece of paper and was pretending.

The episode may have left Healey angry, upset and, later, amused.

The report finds that in the 1970s politics was a rough old business.    

Gordon Brown

A Mr. T Blair, formerly of Islington, was urged by investigators to submit a complaint to investigators in relation to the behaviour of a neighbour, Gordon Brown, from 1994-2007.

Mr Blair was reluctant to cooperate with the inquiry on the grounds that this is politics and if you want to be involved in running the country it is sometimes necessary to pull yourself together.

People imperfect. Who knew?

Having read the Tolley report, the real report into the conduct of Dominic Raab, I must admit to feeling uneasy. As Matthew Parris, a Raab sceptic, put it in The Times this morning, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the former Deputy Prime Minister has been hard done by.

It’s a strange one this. On Twitter, the Raab affair seems to have driven some members of the social media community wild. Extraordinary things are claimed about Raab and his personality, often by people who admit they have never met him and who have formed their view, it appears, based on him being a Tory and by what they’ve seen tweeted by the Guardian and from other people who are furious about Raab.

Declaration, I’ve known Raab only a little for a long time, from before he was an MP, although I’ve had little contact with him in recent years. Even accounting for the fact that (and this is shocking) sometimes politicians are nicer to people who write about politics than they are to their own colleagues, I find it difficult to square the individual I encountered with the claims he is a monster.

He is clearly an intense personality – someone highly intelligent, not a natural public performer, highly strung, and convinced that the country is going soft and must do better.

There are numerous reasons to criticise Dominic Raab, not least over his decisions during the evacuation and abandonment of Afghanistan. Some officials found him tough to deal with.

But is the behaviour recounted in the Tolley report worse than what has been published in authoritative accounts about Gordon Brown’s tenure as Chancellor and Prime Minister? Far from it. Veteran officials, even officials who admired Brown, tell horror stories about the way he talked to people (or didn’t) and the havoc trailing in his wake when Broon was in his pomp.

Brown could balance it with charm and charisma, when he chose.

Raab made himself unpopular but was not politically astute enough, not enough of a natural, to counterbalance his reputation for rigidity. That is why this affair cost him his job. No-one, or no-one senior, could fight to save him.

Brown’s successor as Chancellor Alistair Darling had to deal with Brown’s mistreatment and took an entirely different approach in his dealings with staff and colleagues. Darling was always polite, gracious, wryly amusing and as a result liked, other than by those who were jealous of his job. The downside is that his personality was so equable, and his sense of self-deprecation so finely tuned, that he lacked the streak of ruthless ambition that could have taken him to the premiership.

The point is personality types vary. In politics, or business, or the military, there are always going to be these tensions, at least until the AI-powered perfect machines take over.

In any career who among us has not seen extraordinarily bad or abrupt behaviour, some of it comical, some of it not? Steam is let off. Like any of us, in amongst all the good memories of working with terrific colleagues I’m sure I’ve been spoken to harshly at points or spoken abruptly myself to others, and been in a bad mood sometimes, or transmitted my discontent with shortcomings in a piece of copy in a way that was unconstructive. If you haven’t done this, ever, I apologise for suggesting you have.

This is life. For the most part we mediate tension, or try to, by deploying manners and common sense. If conflict can be avoided, or those personality types who enjoy conflict can be dodged round, or challenged effectively, then great. Most people, in my experience, work at improving the situation and try to retain a sense of humour. If it doesn’t work, sometimes we change careers or take up a hobby, or go to the pub.

I am not making light of the distress that can be caused by bosses or colleagues who are unrelenting, stern or worse. There has been an enormous shift in the last few decades. The availability of business mentoring and improved training means there are plenty of new ways to learn from mistakes.

Unfortunately, in attempting to improve the “workplace” (a word I put in quotation marks because it makes me think of David Brent and The Office) modern bureaucracies are attempting something impossible – the strict codification of feelings. The contemporary way is this: if you feel hurt you have been hurt and the person responsible must be found, expunged, hectored and humiliated out the door, following a quasi-legal public trial.

Employment lawyers will point out that the Raab affair is simply politics catching up with legal reality. Companies have been compelled to operate in this way for decades now and that’s true. But politics, and national leadership, sometimes requires mercurial, difficult, driven characters to volunteer to serve. If we expect them to be perfect we are going to be disappointed, and we’ll end up with even fewer talented people willing to risk a career at Westminster aiming to lead. 

What I’m Watching

Passport to Pimlico. In the office we had been discussing endings, and the way great works often just fizzle out. I referenced this in the newsletter last weekend. Incidentally, apologies there for the lack of a spoiler alert about Logan Roy. I assumed everyone knew about him faking his own death.

One of the best films with an ending that fizzles out is the weird classic comedy Passport to Pimlico, released in 1949. So I watched it again last weekend. In the Brexit wars it was sometimes cited as a foundational text, a warning from history about what happens when a small state declares independence. Through a series of improbable accidents, and the explosion of a wartime bomb revealing buried treasure, Pimlico in London becomes part of Burgundy. The residents declare independence from England, forcing the government to set up customs and immigration posts. Mighty Whitehall is heavy-handed in its treatment of the brave Burgundians of Pimlico. Along the way there is much pluckiness by cockneys, a lot of drinking and class interplay. Again, the working class and the toffs in Passport to Pimlico get along very well. The Duke of Burgundy appears and is welcomed as one of their own. This class theme is a consistent feature of English history that helps explain Brexit and politics since – the working class and the upper class enjoying annoying the over-educated middle classes. I’m middle class and voted for Brexit, so the theory doesn’t work perfectly.

Anyway, Passport to Pimlico (available on BBC iPlayer) is very funny, particularly in the first half. In the end everything is resolved and it all works out nicely. A bit like Brexit… though we haven’t got there yet.

What I’m reading

Not much. There are four weeks to go until the London Defence Conference. This is the new, annual, geopolitical gathering held at King’s College London, with the School of Security Studies 23-24 May. We have an exciting line up of speakers and panelists being announced soon. Our team is working flat out putting it all together and now I had better go and help.