FORMER Lord Chancellor Charles Falconer says calls to suspend Deputy PM Dominic Raab over bullying allegations are “a little bit late”.

Speaking to Camilla Tominey Today on GB News, the Labour peer said if a review found him to be a bully he had to go.

Speaking to GB News, the Labour peer said: “Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but you’ve also got to deal with the practical issue. If serious allegations are made, and for example it is said that someone might be intimidating staff, you’ve got to work out until you discover whether the person has done it or not what the safest course is.

“I find Dominic Raab perfectly ok when I meet him.

“But we’re now at a point I think where we’ve only got a few days or a few weeks to go until Adam Tolley determines whether or not the allegations are true. Is it a little bit late to be talking now about suspension with this due, I just don’t know.

“People should be able to say to the people who are working for them ‘this is what I want, I want to be clear about it’ and I treat you with respect, but I expect delivery. That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If I’m not getting delivery, then I say, ‘this is not good enough’. That is different from picking on junior members of staff, humiliating them and making their life absolutely hell.

“I’m not saying that’s what Raab was doing but that’s where the line falls one way or another. You can’t determine what happened in an individual case, hence why Mr Tolley is looking at it.”

He added: “Mr Tolley has got to work out what was actually happening. And if he [Raab] was vile to the staff and made them feel terrified, then it’s a horrible thing to do and he shouldn’t be the Justice Secretary, but equally it meant he wasn’t getting the best out of the civil service, which is what you need.”

Falconer also discussed former Prime Minister Lizz Truss and blasted her ‘Trussonomics’ economic policies as Prime Minister, following her essay in the Sunday Telegraph.

“I think she was fundamentally wrong in her economic policy,” he said.

“What she was saying was cut taxes, and growth will go up. And the OBR made it clear the growth that would be obtained by her tax reductions would be some minuscule amount that would be completely eroded, as far as individual members of the public were concerned, by the massive increase in for example mortgage rates.

“What I worry about is, presumably Liz Truss is a powerful voice in the Tory party. The Sunday Telegraph has devoted pages and pages to this ‘Rishi Sunak is a weak Prime Minister’ and ‘He hasn’t got control of his party’. If she represents a powerful force, are we going to have deluded Trussonomics again as informing the way this government, the Sunak government, runs the economy?”

“Everybody wants it [GDP] to come down, but only when we can afford it. First of all, we’re going to boost the economy with 28 billion pounds spent on a whole range of changes that will improve the climate change issues, the environmental issues, and they will not only do that, but they will also bring a massive boost to the economy. But not a boost that only helps the rich.

“I noticed that Liz Truss is now calling the market some conspiracy of lefties, which seems to me to be mad. Look at the headline Truss has [in the Sunday Telegraph] ‘I was brought down by the left-wing establishment’, are these the people who own bonds? Is that what you had in mind?

“What does it tell you about Liz truss? Is it not that she was more concerned about how she is to be remembered rather than what’s best for the economy?