It has taken 6 months for a barrister to interview witnesses and produce a report into whether or not Justice Secretary Dominic Raab is a bully.
The report, which apparently doesn't come to any conclusions but just lays out the evidence, has been handed to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak today, who will now decide whether to sack his best friend in politics.
We might never get to know the whole truth, but here's something you can bet your brush on: barristers speak exceedingly slow, so as to fit their points into billable hours, but even a KC can't waste 6 months unless there's plenty of meat on that bone.
We know two things about the allegations - there is a hell of a lot of them, and some seem remarkably petty.
It's thought 24 civil servants from all 3 departments that Raab has headed have complained, and witnesses to the incidents alleged include the top permanent secretaries, and at least one Prime Minister.
The accusations range from being about Raab being "demeaning", "aggressive", "seething", and "a monster" who created a "culture of fear" and drove staff to resignations and suicidal thoughts, to reports of "long silences", throwing tomatoes into a bag, and being "curt" or "abrasive".
A lot of people - including yours truly - have been hauled up for being thoughtless, overly-brusque, not singing Kum-By-Yah enough with their colleagues. But you'd be very hard-pressed to find 24 people who all complain of one person doing the same thing, especially in the kind of small teams which occupy the upper echelons of government.
And there's a good reason for that.
It's because when most of us are told we've bullied someone, that we said the wrong thing or it was handled the wrong way, we say: "Oh s***. Sorry. I didn't mean to do that - let me fix it." For this reason, must of us don't get to the stage of 24 accusers because the first one is enough to warn us, and if not then the second or third will warn our bosses and out the door, or into a side room, we would go.
The response of Raab to the bullying investigations is to be, well, bullish. "I'm confident I behaved professionally at all times," he said, using the same words a bully would. "He's going to come out swinging," say unnamed friends, in the same way henchmen always do.
"THIS IS FINE, IT'S JUST BECAUSE HE'S SO POWERFUL," say far too many people, all of them proving that care in the community just doesn't do what it says on the tin.
If, when someone - or as has been reported in Raab's case, at least one actual Prime Minister - feels compelled to take you to one side and say "look, chum, tone it down a bit", anyone who's not a bully experiences fear, self-doubt, and remorse. Someone whose reaction is to carry on doing exactly whatever it was they were doing before clearly doesn't give one sweet hot toss how other people feel.
Perhaps Raab does care. Because the fact you're making other people feel bad is why a bully bullies - for that kick of control and superiority, as someone junior stumbles in front of you, intimidated by the power you wield.
I've worked for that person. So have you. Nitpicking, nasty, deeply insecure and mostly incompetent, as a rule, and even though both of the bullies I suffered worked in a middle-ranking role in newsrooms, not a single one of the journalists they terrorised on a daily basis ever reported them to management.
We all knew nothing would change. The boss would take their side, not because they were bad but because the editor was also insecure and wanted a lickspittle to do their bullying for them. Journalism attracts dysfunctional people, and the fact those two bullies became a high-profile spokesman and an editor of a national rag was entirely predictable.
Had we stood up to them sooner, they'd probably still have made it, and might be a little nicer. But Fleet Street is old-fashioned, and the rest of the world has moved on. Groping and bullying is no longer tolerated, and many people are rightly doing what previous generations didn't, and complaining.
At time of writing, Sunak is "considering" how best he can wriggle out of sacking his best friend in politics. Raab is biting his nails somewhere, and half the country is waiting to see if complaining about a bad boss works.
Because regardless of whether what Raab has done is called bullying by the PM, most of us would feel that behaviour which upsets 24 people in 3 different jobs is a problem. NOT firing Raab will do more political damage to this government than kicking him out, for the simple reason that everyone who's ever worked in an office has known a Raab, and didn't like him one bit.
Bully or not, fired or not, there is one inevitable conclusion to this whole saga. Men who seek power because they need it will never stop needing more, and Raab will return to government, and TV screens, because he has a desperate need to be more influential than someone with his skill set should ever be.
And that's how we'll know if Raab is a rotter. A real bully always bounces back.