PM May under pressure as UK Foreign Secy quits
UK gets new Brexit secy Dominic Raab after Davis' resignation
Boris Johnson on Monday resigned as UK's Foreign Secretary amid a growing political crisis over Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit strategy.
Johnson is second senior Cabinet minister to quit within hours following Brexit Secretary David Davis's exit. His departure came 30 minutes before Prime Minister Theresa May is due to address Parliament about her new Brexit plan, which has angered many Tory MPs, the BBC reported. The UK is due to leave the 28-member European Union on March 29, 2019, but the two sides have yet to agree how trade will work between them afterwards.
In a statement, No 10 thanked Johnson for his work and said a replacement would be announced shortly, the report said.
Meanwhile, UK gets new Brexit secretary after Davis' resignation
Pro-Brexit minister Dominic Raab was on Monday appointed the new Brexit secretary after David Davis resigned from the post citing differences with Prime Minister Theresa May over the terms on which the country will leave the EU.
Raab, a respected lawyer, is known to be a staunch Brexit supporter and has experience as a junior minister in the Housing and Justice Ministries, the BBC reported. He will now take over day-to-day negotiations with the EU's Michel Barnier.
Davis resigned from the UK government's Department for Exiting the EU late Sunday, two days after the government of May agreed on a plan for post-Brexit relations with the EU at Chequers, a country estate used by Number 10 Downing Street.
He said May had "given away too much too easily" and that he could not remain in his post because he no longer believed in the plan for Britain's future relations with the EU which was earlier backed by the Cabinet. "As I said at Cabinet, the 'common rule book' policy hands control of large swathes of our economy to the EU and is certainly not returning control of our laws in any real sense," Davis said in his resignation letter.
He said he hoped his resignation would make it easier for the UK to resist EU attempts to extract further concessions, but he insisted he was not seeking to undermine or challenge the Prime Minister. "The general direction of policy will leave us at best a weak negotiating position and possibly an inescapable one," Davis said. "The Cabinet decision crystallized this problem. In my view, the inevitable consequence of the proposed policies will be to make the supposed control by Parliament illusory rather than real."