Pardon me if I share my credentials a little bit. All this talk about bullying takes me back to an earlier life when I launched the first ever union campaign against workplace bullying. So, believe me, I do understand how terrible workplace bullying can be.

All this is so much nostalgia, except that it was sometimes my sad role to meet individuals who had been broken by the experience of bullying so that they quit their jobs to begin lengthy periods of struggle with trauma, depression and other forms of mental illness.

I would not want to guess how many people retire prematurely because of a working environment that they cannot stomach for all its stress and tension. Let’s agree however that bullying is not good and that being bullied out of a job is a pretty bad experience for anyone.

Which brings us on to the situation at Downing Street and Andrew Rawnsley’s exposé of life below the stairs. One thing we need to understand from the outset is that anyone can claim to be bullied but not always with justification. I know – I have listened with sympathy and patience to complaints that have sometimes turned out to be heartfelt, sincere and groundless.

Another thing is that in dealing with bullying, we are often dealing with grey areas. Behaviour which may seem OK to one individual may be received in fear and trembling by others. That said, individuals can be permitted to express deep concern, rebuke subordinates for colossal blunders or be passionate in their desire to get the job done, without being dubbed as bullies.

That’s why in references to workplace bullying you tend to see bullying defined in terms of repeated, deliberate, malicious mean-minded behaviour, typically in a series of actions to undermine or belittle the individual. Not every shout or passionate expletive is the work of a bully, though not every blue phrase is a harmless aside either.

In high pressure organisations, people do get heated. In jobs where a lot of passion or pressure is involved you can’t expect everyone to stay on a plane of equanimity all the time. We may not approve of the chef Gordon Ramsay’s hurling profanities around like snowballs for the fun of it but that’s Gordon – and arguably that’s Gordon too.

Let’s be clear about it: bullying makes people miserable, causes distress to other work colleagues and expends human resources. It drives people to quit work before they should even think of doing so and makes them ill into the bargain. 

It can be very hard to recover shattered confidence and start afresh. It is all very well to say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!” but sous chefs and ministerial aides alike have human feelings.

It is pretty clear that an environment in which one can enjoy good working relationships is a key factor element in the good work paradigm. (Good work it will be recalled, following the well known Waddell and Burton study, is good for one’s health and well being.)

The BIS Fair Treatment at Work survey is worth sharing. In a presentation by Craig Barratt and Ian Rutherford given at our recent joint seminar with the London School of Economics, the main survey’s findings from a sample of some 4,000 individuals were compared with an ‘age boost’ sample of 662 interviewees aged 60+.

Eight per cent of 60+workers reported problems with unfair treatment at work compared with 13 per cent in the main survey. In the same way, stress seems to be less of a problem for the 60+ worker than others.

One reason for the apparent greater resilience of older workers is that those workers who feel the stress do in fact get out. The well known ‘healthy survivor’ effect may explain all.  (See the evidence review Ageing, Work-Related Stress and Health which TAEN commissioned with Age Concern and Help the Aged.)

There is something Darwinian about all this. The older survivors are handling work relationships better than their younger counterparts, probably for the simple reason that their greater suffering age mates have long ago quit and retreated into the ranks of the economically inactive.

This is a good enough reason for all organisations to see work relationships as important. We, the public, may feel we deserve people to feel passionate about our needs and problems and even at times to shout about them. But perhaps those expressing horror at the dagger throwing sessions in Gordon’s kitchen cabinet should ask themselves whether this all started because people were driven by a sense of mission.

It sounds anodyne, I know, but working longer entails working happily – and learning to live with one another. No amount of shouting and passion can be a substitute for calm sorting out of problems. But is the latter the stuff that election winners are made of? I don’t know – you say.