We need to fight hard ... I’m up for Brexit challenge
Dominic Raab speaks out in his first newspaper interview since taking over as Brexit Secretary
When Dominic Raab agreed to take on the role of Brexit Secretary, his appointment was met with mixed feelings from Leave supporters.
David Davis had resigned from the role declaring he was unable to support Theresa May’s Brexit White Paper because, he believed, it failed to respect the result of the 2016 referendum.
Mr Raab, too, was one of Brexit’s most ardent champions. So why, given the cards he was dealt, did he take the job?
“We’ve got 12 weeks until October, when we’re really up against a deadline to do this deal,” Mr Raab, 44, who is tipped as a future Tory leader, tells The Sunday Telegraph in his first newspaper interview since his promotion. “Every minute of every day matters ... I think we need to be fighting really hard to secure the best Brexit. I’m up for that challenge and that’s why I took the job.”
Brexiteers have claimed that the deal signed off by the Cabinet at Chequers earlier this month makes a mockery of the Leave campaign’s pledge – adopted by Mrs May – that the UK would take back control of its laws.
They point to the proposed involvement of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in interpreting laws in trade disputes, and a “common rule book” for the production of goods and agricultural products.
Speaking at Chevening, the Kent estate he will now share with Jeremy Hunt, the new Foreign Secretary, and Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, Mr Raab – a former Foreign Office lawyer – declines to state that the common rule book idea is one he would have accepted during the referendum campaign.
But, he says: “In order to bring the 52 per cent and the 48 per cent of this country together, and indeed forge the win-win deal with our EU friends, we would need to be pragmatic. The White Paper delivers that.
“It is also at the same time faithful to the key mandate that I believe we were given by the British people.”
Addressing concerns about the proposed role for the ECJ in interpreting laws as a result of a referral from a new joint arbitration panel between the UK and the EU, Mr Raab is significantly more enthusiastic.
“I’d been arguing for this for a long while, that arbitration was the way forward,” he says. “I don’t have a problem with a confined ECJ role in relation to legal clarity on rules that we’ve agreed, particularly when not only is the scope of those rules finite, but ... we have control ultimately through the parliamentary lock on any changes in that area.”
“Control”, or an apparent lack of it, was one of the reasons for David Davis’s resignation. The Chequers plan, drawn up by a team ultimately reporting to Mrs May, usurped the White Paper being drawn up by Mr Davis’s department.
So did Mr Raab, before he accepted the role, seek any assurances from the Prime Minister about changes in the relationship between his department and 10 Downing Street? “Not really, because the Prime Minister makes an offer and you accept it or you don’t.”
But they did agree on the need for the negotiations to be handled by one team of officials, overseen by him and Mrs May.
“One thing we did discuss straight away, and agreed on, it was the Prime Minister’s suggestion and I had some thoughts about it, [was that] we want one negotiation track, we want to get the best out of all of our civil servants and their expert advice, ministers must be accountable for decisions every step along the way, I will deputise in the negotiations ... and that’s the way we get the most effective, professional use out of these crucial 12 weeks.”
He also confirms that he has begun attending meetings between Mrs May and Oliver Robins, her Europe adviser – an invitation not believed to have been extended to his predecessor.
A day earlier, Mr Raab met Michel Barnier in Brussels for their first talks.
Clearly conscious that Mrs May has taken a seismic gamble on the Chequers deal, the minister, while praising the EU’s negotiator as a “good man”, warns that the UK’s “ambition, energy, pragmatism” must be matched by Brussels.
“I’m absolutely convinced that with the ambition in our White Paper, with the progress that we’ve made, and with the energy and renewed vim and vigour that I’ve described, that we can get this done, if it’s reciprocated from our EU partners,” he says.
Brexiteers are concerned that Brussels could simply string Mr Raab along with the pretence of taking the Chequers deal seriously, while hoping to force the UK on to a perpetual “backstop” agreement for customs arrangements, which they fear would keep the country tied to the EU.
The backstop is being drawn up to ensure that there is no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland if no final agreement is reached. Mr Raab says it is “well understood” that the backstop under discussion “can’t be an endless limbo period or a tunnel which only leads back to the customs union of the EU via the backdoor. That’s not going to happen.”
He adds that a recent Commons vote effectively ruling out Northern Ireland remaining within the EU’s customs regime – Mr Barnier’s proposed solution – showed that Parliament supports the Government’s insistence that it will not “do anything which would put at risk the integrity of the United Kingdom”.
Next month the Government will begin publishing 70 documents aimed at helping to prepare the country for the possibility of a no-deal outcome, which could be an imminent prospect if the Chequers deal is not agreed.
Mr Raab says the no-deal preparations are “the responsible thing for any government to do”.
“Let me be really clear about it – our aim is to get the best deal, the optimum deal ... but we’re ready for any eventuality. Of course the EU has been talking about their no-deal preparations ... because there are European business and jobs at stake and it was the Bank of England that said in some of those areas, a no-deal scenario hits them more than it hits us.”
In a move likely to be welcomed by Tory Leavers, he signals his agreement with their demand that the payment of Britain’s agreed £39billion divorce bill be made conditional on the EU agreeing to a free trade deal.
“You can’t have one side fulfilling its side of the bargain and the other side not, or going slow, or failing to commit.”
‘We’ve got 12 weeks until October, when we’re really up against a deadline to do this deal.’