Disgraced former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab is quitting Parliament at the next general election; he won’t stand for election again.

And it’s just as well, after he was found to have bullied civil servants on two occasions by an inquiry that reported just over a month ago.

The BBC report on his decision does its best to give him a reasonable send-off, covering his career in terms of the jobs he’s held in government.

This Writer feels no compulsion to exercise such restraint. So what shall we talk about?

How about his decision, as Justice Secretary, to refuse an inquiry into the sexual abuse of thousands of (now) men at youth detention centres when they were young boys? We still don’t know why he did that. Will we ever, now he is going?

His failure to get the late comedian and TV presenter Paul O’Grady’s name right while trying to pay tribute to him (and his ill-advised decision to combine this blunder with an attack on so-called ‘woke’ comedy)?

I’ve got a clip of this:

His plan to strip human rights protections from people who have been targeted by police for ‘stop and search’ procedures and/or questioning over their immigration status, which was dubbed racist because ethnic minority groups are far more likely to have been targeted in these ways?

His refusal to accept the facts of unemployment? I have audio of this:

His almost fact-free defence of Evgeny Lebedev’s elevation to the House of Lords?

His hopeless attempt to defend then-prime minister Boris Johnson’s failure to wear a mask during a hospital visit, when rules dictated that everybody should wear masks at all times? Let’s have some video of that as well, shall we?

His fascist claim that his planned overhaul of the Human Rights Act would include a mechanism to “correct” (ha ha!) rulings by the European Court of Human Rights?

His rejection of calls to treat misogyny as a hate crime – despite the fact that he didn’t know what misogyny is?

His speech to a Tory Party conference in which he used a hypothetical situation that it is doubtful any judge would allow to happen as an excuse to justify removing human rights from all of us?

His admission (as Foreign Secretary) that the evacuation of Afghanistan was a shambles because the UK’s intelligence agencies were outsmarted by a gang of desert-dwelling bandits?

The fact that he was on holiday in Crete when Kabul fell to the Taliban, and at first refused to return to the UK when the emergency was reported to him? He did deny paddleboarding while UK citizens scrambled to escape the new regime; according to Raab, the sea was “closed”.

His failure to realise that much of UK trade relies on the Dover-Calais crossing?

His 2018 tweet about wages rising faster than they had in years – which only brought attention to the fact that wages had fallen drastically under the Conservatives and had never been as high as they were under Gordon Brown?

The list goes on and on. The above only goes back five years!

Raab has been an utter disaster as a member of Parliament and a government minister and his departure will improve the quality of the UK’s leadership. Sadly, though, he isn’t even the worst Tory minister. What will it take to winkle them out?

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