The weaponisation of ‘bullying’

Bullying appears to be suffering from inflation, like everything else. Certainly as an art form it seems to be in decline. As exhibit A I should like to present the ‘bullying’ recently ascribed to Gavin Williamson MP.

Williamson is a hard man to defend. He has not excelled in any of the portfolios he has been given. The principal reason he sticks in the memory is that he does quite a good impression of someone doing an impression of someone sinister. The figure he most resembles is of someone who, at a young age, read the tiniest amount of Machiavelli and experienced feelings of arousal that they had not previously felt. ‘Haha, yes,’ I imagine a young Williamson saying. ‘It is indeed better to be feared than to be loved.’ He rose to be minister without portfolio.

Perhaps as a result, if you ever asked me to guess what an average Williamson text message would look like, it would exactly resemble the messages released this week which are at the centre of a ‘bullying’ row. Ahead of the Queen’s funeral, Williamson sent text messages to then chief whip Wendy Morton complaining about not having a seat in Westminster Abbey. ‘It’s very clear how you are going to treat a number of us which is very stupid and you are showing fuck all interest in pulling things together,’ one message read. Another said: ‘Don’t bother asking anything from me.’ The general tenor is: ‘You will regret the day that you crossed the member for South Staffordshire. Mwahaha.’ It has since been alleged that Williamson told a senior civil to ‘slit your throat’ and ‘jump out of a window’. He has now been reported to parliament’s bullying watchdog and resigned from government to ‘clear his name’.

While there is much to be said about this, I cannot quite agree that it is bullying. Or at least it can only be called bullying because everything is now called bullying if the accusation is politically expedient to a particular politician’s enemies.

Take the eternally sanctimonious ex--vicar Chris Bryant, who last month stood up in the House of Commons and told an outright porky. The Revd Bryant informed the House that he had witnessed the most terrible scenes in the voting lobbies during one of Liz Truss’s ill-fated efforts to get her party in order. Bryant claimed to have seen evidence of bullying. A subsequent investigation found no such evidence. Bryant himself then said that he would not be ‘bullied into silence’, as though anyone knows of any force on Earth capable of silencing the member for Rhondda.

The point is that accusations of ‘bullying’ seem to have become a useful weapon of political attack. Who knows why now? Perhaps all the other political weapons have run out or run low. But for some reason if you want to get a political enemy these days, it is enough to level bullying allegations against them. Priti Patel was put through this when she was Home Secretary. Labour MPs feigned absolute horror at the idea of a minister raising their voice to civil servants, in the apparent belief that Gordon Brown, Damian McBride and co. always behaved like the Sisters of Mercy.

The same tactic was used to attack John Bercow. On this one it is again tempting to allow the tactic. Bercow deserves to disappear from view because he attempted an entirely anti-democratic coup while wedged into the role of Speaker of the House of Commons. Yet it was not this that did for him. Bercow’s ascent into the House of Lords has been stymied by the conclusion of an official inquiry that he was a ‘serial bully’. One complainant – a former naval captain – testified that on one occasion Bercow was ‘furious beyond the normal reaction’. The Speaker apparently swore at the complainant, thumped the table and waved his little arms, while ‘spittle’ came from his mouth.

Again, perhaps I am simply unsurprise-able, but if you had ever asked me how I thought John Bercow behaves to anyone over whom he had even the tiniest measure of power, my guess would have been almost verbatim the account that I have quoted above. A report finding that he liked to throw around his weight – among other small objects – and had a tendency to belittle people who worked beneath him is something that does not shock me. I loathe Bercow, but in the main the bullying accusations against him seemed to be a sort of political tool to get him. And the problem with political tools, when they work, is that people then use them more and more.

It is hard to be a government whip and not do things that some people will call ‘bullying’. It is very hard to tell an indolent civil servant that they should enact government policy whether they agree with it or not without the accusation hovering.

In my mind, bullying is a very different thing from what is being described in most of the cases above. In my younger years I managed to see a fair panoply of the educational opportunities that our country affords – everything from a failed inner-city state school to the boarding school near Slough. Perhaps as a result, the bar of what I would consider bullying is relatively high.

Bullying to my mind is when people gang up on someone and steal their lunch money, or threaten to kick a boy’s head in, with a fair likelihood that they will follow up on the threat. More innocent examples of bullying would include putting boys’ heads down a lavatory or placing a dead fish in their pillow case when they are not in their room.

Of course there are many other ways of bullying people. The imaginations of children, in particular, are almost endless. But I cannot agree that Williamson’s text messages are in any way similar to him shaking a government whip by the ankles until her lunch money fell out. Or that Bercow screaming and banging his hands on the table before a former naval captain is akin to him bog-washing the fellow.

I do not wish to make much light of serious abuses of power. But it strikes me that we might aim for a modicum of sanity on this and on so many other matters.