Lawyer with karate black belt gets his former boss’s old job
NEW BREXIT Secretary Dominic Raab is one of the staunchest supporters of EU withdrawal on the Conservative benches, calling for the move long before the referendum.
After seeing his budding ministerial career apparently stalled when Theresa May became Prime Minister and decided not to offer him a job, he has now been catapulted into one of the most crucial roles in her Cabinet team.
A lawyer by training, and a black belt in karate, the fiercely ambitious 44-year-old looked set for a swift rise up the ministerial ranks after his election as MP for Tory safe seat Esher and Walton in 2010.
But a series of controversies held back his elevation, with Mrs May taking particular offence at his description of some feminists as “obnoxious bigots” in a 2011 online article in which he attacked the “equality bandwagon” and said that men were getting “a raw deal”.
Mrs May, who was then Minister for Equalities as well as Home Secretary, responded within days with a fierce slapdown in the House of Commons, telling him that his comment was “not the way forward (to) get away from gender warfare”.
In 2012, Mr Raab joined other Tory rising stars in putting his name to a manifesto called Britannia Unchained, which raised eyebrows by branding the British “among the worst idlers in the world”.
He was appointed Civil Liberties Minister in the Ministry of Justice following David Cameron’s election victory in 2015.
In 2017, he was branded “offensive” by then Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron after telling a radio interviewer that “the typical user of a food bank is not someone that’s languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cashflow problem”.
After a prominent role in the Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum, there was initially no place in Mrs May’s administration for Mr Raab, who was sacked from ministerial office on the Prime Minister’s arrival in power that year.
He proved a loyal pro-Brexit outrider on the backbenches and was rewarded with a more senior role in the Ministry of Justice following last year’s General Election, and moved to the crucial job of Housing Minister in January.
The son of a Czech-born Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis in 1938, Mr Raab was brought up in Buckinghamshire and took a law degree at Oxford University before switching to Cambridge for his Master’s.
He worked as a lawyer at the Foreign Office before entering the world of politics in 2006 as an aide first to David Davis – the man he is now replacing as Brexit Secretary – and then Dominic Grieve, the Remain-backing Tory MP who is now likely to be a thorn in his side from the backbenches.