Karate black belt who even scares the PM
He’s the new Brexit Secretary — and the...
THERESA May won’t have enjoyed promoting Dominic Raab to her Cabinet. Lawyer Raab, in addition to being a karate-chopping martial arts enthusiast, is a cold- livered, hard- nosed, flinty-hearted, quick-tongued Brexiteer. He used to be chief of staff to David Davis – whose place in Cabinet he has taken – but he is younger and pushier than the veteran ‘DD’.
Worse (as far as Mrs May is concerned), Raab made her life difficult over prisoners’ rights when she was Home Secretary in David Cameron’s Coalition government. Mr Raab thought the Government was being too wet in caving in to European judges’ instructions to grant convicts wider rights. Mrs May just wanted an easy life. Didn’t she always?
In 2011, when Raab had been an MP less than a year, he campaigned against Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights telling us to give voting rights to prisoners.
‘This goes to the heart of our democracy,’ he declared. ‘ Who writes the law of the land?’ Mr Raab, in accepting a place in Mrs May’s Cabinet, is unlikely to have surrendered his principles. Whereas Mr Davis called himself ‘a reluctant conscript’, Mr Raab may prove more actively obstructive and on top of the legalistic detail.
At 44, Dominic Raab has the composure and coolness of an older man. Much is made of his trimness of physique, attributed not least to his boxing and his third-dan black belt in karate. He is such an exercise freak that eight years ago he had to have a hip replacement. ‘Too much kicking Lib Dems over the years,’ he joked.
Born in Buckinghamshire, he was educated at grammar school in Amersham and took a law degree from Oxford before doing a master’s at Cambridge. He’s bright, this one, but not a predictable Establishment man.
Raab, whose wife Erika is a Brazilian marketing executive, is very much on the aspirational/Thatcherite wing of the Tory Party but takes a stern view against fat-cat executive pay. When the boss of Persimmon Homes was given a £ 75million handout, Mr Raab called it ‘almost unfathomable’.
On leaving university he joined City law firm Linklaters and was seconded briefly to Liberty, the human rights pressure group, and to offices in Brussels to develop an expertise on EU and World Trade Organisation law. In 2000 he joined the Foreign Office – to work on, among other things, the laws governing outer space – and in 2003 he was posted to the Hague to specialise in bringing war criminals to justice. He became MP for the safe Tory seat of Esher and Walton, succeeding the pro-EU Ian Taylor (Raab was chosen in an open primary). For the previous four years he had worked for the Conservatives in Opposition where his bosses included – choicely – not only Mr Davis but also the Europhile Dominic Grieve. In the 2010 election result, he doubled the Tories’ majority in Esher.
HE was soon impressing Westminster with his Commons performances and became a justice minister in the Cameron government. When Mrs May became PM she inexplicably dropped him from ministerial office, but she brought him back a year later as a justice minister. Word at the Commons is that Mrs May was a little scared of him.
In the Cameroon modernising years, Mr Raab was pro-gay marriage but spoke out boldly – some would say bravely – against unreasonably militant feminists, saying that they could be ‘ amongst the most obnoxious bigots’. That created a mighty to-do among bien pensants, but Raab stuck to his argument that positive discrimination against young men was exactly that – discriminatory – and the opposite of meritocracy.
A few months ago he managed to find himself in the newspapers when his diary secretary was alleged to be working as a call-girl (rest assured, Mr Raab is a happily married father). But it was what she told an undercover reporter that almost caused more controversy.
She said her boss ordered the same combination of food for lunch from Pret a Manger every day: namely, a chicken caesar and bacon baguette, a superfruit salad and a watermelon smoothie. The 820 calories in question – which the minister denied eating every day – became so notorious that they were called the Dominic Raab Special.
Whatever the truth about his lunchtime favourite, he may have rather a lot else on his plate in the coming weeks.