The Kemi Badenoch ‘bullying’ claims reek of desperation

Kemi Badenoch, widely backed to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, has been accused of bullying by a small number of officials who worked under her at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). The allegations, which were actively solicited by a Guardian journalist, have been rebuffed by the DBT and denied by Badenoch. She has described the trumped-up accusations against her as a ‘hit job’ designed to derail her leadership campaign. And she’s right to do so.

That she has been accused of workplace bullying is telling in itself. It seems that adults are more likely to cry ‘Bully!’ than children are nowadays. We’ve seen similar allegations also made against other former Tory ministers, including Dominic Raab, Gavin Williamson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel. Royal staff have accused Meghan Markle of bullying. Half the cast of Strictly Come Dancing apparently bully their dance partners. Boy George was accused of bullying Matt Hancock following their stint on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity. Workplace bullying is even a plotline in long-running radio soap The Archers – a sure sign this is an issue preoccupying Middle England.

The Guardian is really trying to hype up these particular bullying allegations. Badenoch is accused not just of bullying but of ‘traumatising’ staff, too. Yet it provides few concrete examples to illustrate Badenoch’s reign of terror. She may have caused some department officials to have felt ‘pushed out’, thanks to the supposed harshness of her demands. These include requesting that Coke Zero be served at room temperature in team meetings. The horror! Yet it seems that that’s enough to justify a Guardian headline claiming that Badenoch created an ‘intimidating’ and even ‘toxic’ atmosphere’ at the DBT.

The vagueness of the allegations shouldn’t be a surprise. Bullying accusations have taken off in the workplace precisely because the charge is so nebulous. It’s enough for a person to feel that they have been bullied to make them into a victim of bullying. In this way, the increasing prevalence of the accusation is less a response to actual behaviour in the workplace than it is to people’s changing interpretation of that behaviour. It reflects people’s readiness to identify as victims. It speaks to a diminished sense of adulthood in which employees are not expected to address problems as they arise themselves. Instead, they appeal to managers to instigate formal procedures against supposedly bullying colleagues.

The rise of bullying allegations is also fuelled by a climate in which people experience work in a more individualised way. Once, workers would have banded together to complain about a bad boss or poor working conditions. Now they see themselves as solitary victims of bullying.

It’s clear that people’s attitudes towards work have shifted. It used to be accepted that the trade-off for being paid meant being held to account for what you do during working hours. Having a job meant meeting other people’s expectations, even if these were goals you did not share or you were having a bad day. In short, work was not seen as a pleasant route to self-fulfilment. It was a necessary means of making a living. That was always grasped as the harsh reality of selling your labour – doing stuff you might not enjoy.

It seems that working in this sense, of meeting the expectations of the boss, now comes as a shock to many civil servants. The idea of ‘service’ used to mean acting according to the wishes of a democratically elected minister for the benefit of the nation. With Badenoch in charge of the equalities brief, it meant working for a woman who challenged the idea that Britain was structurally racist and insisted on defining women as biological females.

For activist civil servants, with their own ideas and agenda to promote, this was a step too far. Some seem to have eagerly framed their experience of being asked to implement policies they disagreed with as bullying.

This is why Badenoch is so disliked by her erstwhile civil servants. Not because of her actual behaviour but because of her politics. She has convictions and is not another mindless technocrat. When Badenoch makes statements about racism or women’s rights, she’s not rehearsing lines from a script but standing up for what she believes is right. It is her views, and the passion behind them, that trigger those civil servants who are quite happy to waste tax-payer funded hours attending diversity-training sessions while wearing rainbow lanyards.

To the further annoyance of woke civil servants, Badenoch criticises their identitarian worldview as a black woman. Rather than presenting herself as a victim of racism, she argues Britain is the best place in the world to be black. Rather than bigging up diversity programmes, she argues that they are ‘wasteful’ and ‘have backfired’. Her very existence challenges the woke view that political ideas are determined by skin colour.

Badenoch’s views might be unpopular with a small group of activist civil servants but they are popular with Conservative Party members and with the public at large. So much so, in fact, that she is considered to be the frontrunner in the upcoming Tory leadership race.

The prospect of Badenoch challenging Starmer at the next election is the Labour Party’s biggest nightmare. It is for this reason that her opponents are trying so hard to discredit her. Her critics prefer accusations of bullying to the hard work of challenging her ideas. They need to grow up.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at MCC Budapest. Read her new report, Sexualising Children? The Rise of Comprehensive Sexuality Education, here.