Tony Vaughan and the myth of adult bullying

It’s a sorry sight. The Hon. Tony Vaughan KC, the Labour MP for Folkestone and Hythe, stands before the House of Commons to give a grovelling apology for “abuse of power”. It is the culmination of several months of behind-the-scenes rigmarole. Back in June, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, found Vaughan in breach of Parliament’s Bullying and Harassment Policy. Vaughan lodged an appeal, and so something called the “Independent Experts Panel” stepped in.

This unelected body upheld most of the unelected Commissioner’s findings against the elected representative. And so Vaughan had to apologise before the House — on pain, one assumes, of further disciplinary action. He also could not say anything about the investigation while it was ongoing. Parliamentary privilege ought to protect all manner of speech; but here, in the chamber, his speech was coerced. What grievous offences demanded this ritual humiliation of a sitting MP?

Vaughan had to apologise for hugging a member of staff without asking her first. He was sorry for once taking a phone out of her hands. He was sorry for — perish the thought — twice abruptly terminating a phone call. In the words of the Commissioner, now confirmed by the Independent Experts Panel: “ending a phone call abruptly without sufficient cause or a later explanation can reasonably be considered to be insulting behaviour.” Vaughan fought the Blob, and the Blob won.

Now he is a sad puddle of a man. You can see the thought flicker behind his eyes: “Why did I bother?” Why would anybody commit themselves to public service, if this is what awaits them? It would have been better to remain a silk at the bar, on a much higher salary: at least there one’s indignities can be suffered in private. It is now well known that HR is among Britain’s biggest growth industries. Because people in a ballooning sector have to justify their jobs somehow, there has been a concomitant increase in talk of “workplace bullying”.

Complaints are often masked under this term, which seems to cover all sorts of general unpleasantness. It’s a word that still has strong connotations of the schoolyard. A Google Ngram search suggests that “ school bullying ” took off as a cause for concern in the Eighties; “ workplace bullying ” had to wait until the late Nineties, and has skyrocketed in recent years. This sort of policing of ordinary interpersonal behaviour is bad enough in other lines of work.

But in the context of Parliament, it is a genuine constitutional scandal. The “ watchdogs ” are on the loose, and they are out of control. They even brought down a deputy prime minister in Dominic Raab. Everyone knew he was irritable and surly; he might even be an arsehole. But among the cases of “bullying” upheld against him in 2023 was his description of a subordinate’s work as “useless” and “woeful”. Well, what is one to do if a subordinate’s work is “useless” and “woeful”?

Politics is a serious, high-stakes business. Parliament should not be a primary school, where every criticism has to be couched in language like “it would have been even better if…”. It shows contempt to the public to waylay their representatives with months, even years, of Kafkaesque “procedure”. They have more important things to be doing. These shadowy, unelected bodies have the power to extinguish an electoral mandate at the stroke of a hand.

The politicians themselves — they only have themselves to blame — have handed over an important instrument of sovereignty to a faceless, labyrinthine bureaucracy. An MP channels the will of the people, and it is to the people alone, not the shadow courts, to whom they ought to answer. They tap their power from a hallowed source. Past parliamentarians understood this, and jealously guarded their independence. They fought wars for this principle, beheading and deposing those kings who dared tread on their rights.

It is a pity that today’s crop can’t show the same resolve. Samuel Rubinstein is a writer and historian. si_rubinstein