The bottom line: Dominic Raab’s resignation slightly improves Rishi Sunak’s chances at the election

The deputy prime minister was a useful ally, but he wasn’t delivering what the voters want

You can see why Dominic Raab is cross. At most other times, he would have survived the independent inquiry into allegations against him of bullying. The report by Adam Tolley, the lawyer, was cloudy about what he had actually done wrong, anonymising the accounts of his abuse of power in the literary equivalent of pixelation.

That meant the adverse findings against the deputy prime minister were unspecific, in order to protect the identity of the victims, while the only glint of real life was in the direct quotations from Raab himself, describing officials’ work as “utterly useless” and “woeful”. (Raab denied using the words; Tolley concluded: “On balance, I think that these were the words used; they comprised criticism that was not in the nature of constructive feedback.”)

Tolley said that those words were part of conduct that was “abrasive” rather than “abusive”, although he appeared to say that other, less specific things did amount to bullying. Thus Raab seemed hoist with his own petard, having said to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that “if an allegation of bullying is upheld, I will resign”.

Even so, in other times he could have stayed in post. Tolley never actually said Raab bullied anyone – his report sets out a definition of bullying and then sets out findings that appear to meet it. Raab could have apologised, promised to learn and ridden out the media storm. And by “apologised” I mean a meaningful apology instead of the usual non-apology of saying sorry if poor snowflakes were offended by my perfectionism, which is what Raab in effect said in his letter of resignation.

Unfortunately for Raab, though, the report came six months after a new prime minister came to office promising that his government would be “characterised by integrity”, and 18 months before an election in which Labour will try to characterise Rishi Sunak differently – by the standards of Boris Johnson.

The most important thing for Sunak, therefore, was to prove that he would run his government to higher ethical standards than his predecessor. We don’t know exactly what was said by Sunak in his phone conversation with Raab on Friday morning, but we can deduce that he made it clear that Raab would have to go. Raab, whose allies had said he would “fight to the death” the night before, then resigned while making it equally clear that he didn’t think he should have to.

You could tell it was the right decision by the disappointment in Keir Starmer’s voice as he tried to pretend that it made the prime minister look indecisive. Labour partisans say that Sunak should have sacked Raab rather than allowing him to resign, but Sunak has a governing party to manage, in which a lot of ministers might resent what they see as summary dismissal for “telling someone to do their job”, as Joy Morrissey, a junior government whip, put it.

Such procedural niceties aside, Sunak can point to the contrast between the case of Priti Patel, found by an independent inquiry to have bullied officials and allowed to carry on as home secretary by Johnson, and that of Raab, no longer a minister. A contrast enhanced by Raab’s status as one of Sunak’s supporters, who backed him for the leadership and who had been rewarded by being allowed to keep the biggest bauble, the title of deputy prime minister.

High moral standards may not be worth much in politics, but we only have to imagine what Labour would have made of it had Raab stayed on to see that Sunak gains a marginal electoral benefit from his nominal deputy’s departure.

The prime minister’s calculation might have been a little different if Raab had been a more effective minister. Not only might Raab have had a stronger defence of upsetting civil servants if he had something to show for it, but the Conservative case at the election would have been more persuasive if the Ministry of Justice had actually started to clear the backlog of court cases.

Given that Labour is going to make much of crime and the failings of the criminal justice system, Sunak urgently needed someone who could deliver measurable improvements over the next year and a half – and sell them to a sceptical electorate. I don’t know if Alex Chalk, the new justice secretary, is that person, but I think he has a better chance than Raab.

Nor had Raab managed to cut through the Gordian knot of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is an urgent requirement of a workable policy to stop the boats. As custodian of the Tory promise to replace the Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights, Raab was head of outreach to the wilder shores of Tory Euroscepticism – to the sort of people like the home secretary who want to repudiate the Convention and all its works.

Raab was on the right side of that debate, trying to persuade colleagues that pulling out of the ECHR would be a mistake, but he had failed to come up with much by way of creative solutions to the problem. Perhaps it is insoluble, but you cannot blame Sunak for hoping that someone else can do better.

The prime minister is in a difficult position. His five priority targets are all being missed. The numbers for inflation, growth, debt, waiting lists and the small boats are heading in the wrong direction for an election in October next year. He needs results on the boats and he needs crime to be neutralised.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, showed that Labour can be dangerous when she tabled an amendment yesterday to the Illegal Migration Bill requiring terrorist suspects arriving on small boats to be put under Terrorism Investigation and Prevention Measures (TPIMs, which replaced control orders in 2011).

Sunak needs to do more than to simply set a high moral tone. He needs his new team of vanilla technocrats – Chalk at justice and Oliver Dowden as deputy prime minister – to start to deliver the policies the voters want.

The bottom line is that Dominic Raab’s resignation neutralises Labour’s onslaught on “integrity”, and slightly improves Sunak’s chances of delivering on the people’s priorities.