Just three weeks ago, Dominic Raab was sitting in Number 10 being offered his old jobs back, after a short hiatus from government thanks to Liz Truss.
But now he has returned to government as justice secretary and deputy prime minister, he is facing questions over his conduct during his previous tenures in the roles, and at other departments too.
Sources close to Mr Raab have hit back at the claims, with a number of his Tory colleagues standing by him as “an excellent and considerate boss”.
However, as accusations continue to emerge, let’s look back at what has been reported so far:
The first claims against Mr Raab emerged on Friday in The Guardian about his stint at the MoJ between September 2021 and September 2022 under Boris Johnson.
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The newspaper said around 15 senior civil servants in his private office had been offered “respite or a route out” after his return was announced, due to concerns some were still traumatised from working for him.
Multiple MoJ sources also said he had previously created a “culture of fear” in the department, alleging he was “demeaning rather than demanding” with civil servants, and that he was “very rude and aggressive”, adding: “[He] wasn’t just unprofessional, he was a bully”.
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But a spokesperson for the department said there was “zero tolerance for bullying across the civil service”, adding: “The deputy prime minister leads a professional department, driving forward major reforms, where civil servants are valued and the level of ambition is high.”
Tomatoes and riot acts
Within hours of the story breaking, two more emerged from Mr Raab’s earlier time at the MoJ.
One in the Sun claimed he had thrown tomatoes from his salad at staff.
And another in the Mirror said he had been given the nickname “The Incinerator” because of how quickly he “burns through” employees.
But the deputy PM’s spokesman called the salad attack claim “complete nonsense” and denied a high turnover of staff in his departments.
All three of the articles also claimed the permanent secretary, Antonia Romeo, warned Mr Raab to treat staff with respect on his return, with one source, who was not in the room at the time, saying she had “read him the riot act”.
Image: Boris Johnson appointed Dominic Raab to his cabinet after he took office in 2019
On Saturday, a single source told ITV News that the Cabinet Office had been informed about concerns over Mr Raab’s behaviour when he was Brexit secretary in 2018.
The Observer picked up the story, saying a “formal expression of concern” had been sent to a senior official in the Department for Exiting the European Union, alleging “unprofessional, even bullying, conduct of the minister towards his private office”.
But the Cabinet Office told the newspaper it had “no record of any formal complaints” being passed onto them.
Surveys and support
Come Sunday, the focus fell onto Mr Raab’s time as foreign secretary, between July 2020 and September 2021.
A survey was leaked to ITV News showing eight people working in his private office at the time claimed to have been bullied or harassed at work, while 15 staff reported witnessing another person being bullied or treated unfairly.
The results were anonymous, though, so neither the perpetrator nor victim could be identified.
In response, a spokesman for Mr Raab said he had “high standards, works hard, and expects a lot from his team as well as himself”, but that he “worked well with officials” and “always acts with the utmost professionalism”.
As Rishi Sunak travelled to the G20 summit in Bali on Sunday night, he faced questions about the reappointment of Mr Raab, but insisted he did not “recognise that characterisation” of his colleague and was “unaware” of any formal complaints being made against him.
A Number 10 spokeswoman also said: “As the prime minister has said before, people in public life should treat others with consideration and respect. Those are principles that this government will stand by.
“There are established procedures by which civil servants can raise complaints. These processes allow allegations to be looked at and considered with due process and a fair hearing.”
Image: Rishi Sunak gave his support to his deputy while on a flight to Bali for the G20
When Monday rolled around, an interview with a former top official at the Foreign Office during Mr Raab’s tenure set tongues wagging again.
Former permanent secretary Lord Simon McDonald was asked on LBC whether the previous days’ bullying allegations were plausible, and he replied: “Yes.”
He added: “Dominic Raab is one of the most driven people I ever worked for, he was a tough boss.
“Maybe they are euphemisms, but I worked closely with him and I didn’t see everything that happened.”
Within hours, there was another story from The Guardian, claiming Mr Raab had been warned about his behaviour towards officials at the Foreign Office on multiple occasions by none other than Lord McDonald.
The paper also alleged that Lord McDonald had several informal conversations with the head of the propriety and ethics team at the Cabinet Office about him between 2019 and 2020 about the issue.
A spokesman for Mr Raab told The Guardian: “Dominic had frequent discussions with his permanent secretary at the Foreign Office about how best to run the department and ensure that it delivered to the highest standard in challenging circumstances such as during COVID.”
Behaviour and high standards
Tuesday and Lord McDonald was back on the airwaves, talking to Times Radio about Mr Raab. He went further than in his LBC interview, saying many colleagues were “scared” to go into the then foreign secretary’s office when he was in charge.
The peer said Mr Raab “was not aware of the impact of his behaviour on the people working for him and couldn’t be made to see that impact”, adding: “Colleagues did not complain to me formally, it was kind of their professional pride to cope, but many were scared to go into his office.”
And he said the minister’s defence was that “he treated everybody in the building in the same way – he was as abrasive and controlling with junior ministers and senior officials as he was with his private secretaries.”
But again, Mr Raab’s spokesman insisted he had “acted with professionalism and integrity in all of his government roles”, adding: “He has an excellent record of driving positive change in multiple government departments by working well with officials.
“He holds everyone, and most of all himself, to the high standards that the British people would expect of their government.”
Image: Lord McDonald was the top civil servant at the Foreign Office during Mr Raab’s tenure.
There was another accusation coming his way – this time from Labour’s Lisa Nandy, who shadowed Mr Raab when he was at the Foreign Office.
She told Sky News she had heard “a number of rumours this was a pattern of behaviour”, adding: “It’s been something of an open secret in Westminster for the last few years there is a problem in the justice department, there was a problem in the Foreign Office – it was apparently particularly directed towards women.
“I think it’s really damning that Rishi Sunak has appointed Dominic Raab to this post knowing that this is potentially an issue.”
But Mr Raab’s spokesman “categorically” denied the allegation, while his team said suggestions he has a woman problem was “nonsense”.
A source close to Mr Raab said: “This is baseless mudslinging with no grounding in reality, and undermines serious cases of bullying and inappropriate behaviour.”
The investigation
Wednesday means Prime Minister’s Questions and, as Mr Sunak’s deputy, it is down to him to stand in while the boss is away at the G20 summit.
But the drama came early as two hours before his appearance, he sent out a tweet, revealing he had written to the PM to request an independent investigation into two formal complaints that had been made against him – one at the Foreign Office and another at the Ministry of Justice.
Mr Raab said he had “never tolerated bullying, and always sought to reinforce and empower the teams of civil servants working in my respective departments”.
But he promised to “cooperate fully” with the investigation and “respect whatever outcome you decide”.
Mr Sunak replied, agreeing this was “the right course of action”, adding: “Integrity, professionalism and accountability are core values of this government. It is right that these matters are investigated fully.”
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.
Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.
“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.
“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”
Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.
Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.
Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.
Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.
They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.
Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.
“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
Image: Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy
US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’
It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.
Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.
“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.
Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.
He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.
“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.